Can a report exempt someone from owning a firearm in the U.S.? I was reading a thread on the social media site Reddit and the OP discussed how he found out that he was unable to purchase a firearm with no reason given. Though he had no criminal record and no involuntarily commission, he had been reported by a forensic psychiatrist to the Met Police (he's a dual UK/US citizen) for homicidal ideation and he figures that when he moved back to the U.S., the police detectives also informed the FBI who noted and it came up on a background check. But I've heard that reports from the public/doctors aren't enough to bar someone from owning a gun and I'm thinking it may be a false story. What is true?
What is true is that 18 USC 922(d) says It shall be unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person...(4) has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution &quot;Adjudicated as a mental defective&quot; is then defined in 27 CFR 478.11 A determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that a person, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease: (1) Is a danger to himself or to others; or (2) Lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs. A forensic psychiatrist is not a general &quot;member of the public&quot;, so it is credible to consider one to be a &quot;lawful authority&quot;. No aspect of the law limits whose law gives the lawful authority his authority: of course more details on the psychiatrist would be necessary to determine that this is a proper application of the restriction.
39 CFR § 232.1(l) provides that: Notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, rule or regulation, no person while on postal property may carry firearms, other dangerous or deadly weapons, or explosives, either openly or concealed, or store the same on postal property, except for official purposes. Police officers on active duty, enforcing the law at the request of post office employees, appear to be discharging &quot;official purposes&quot;.
It is probably illegal in all of the jurisdictions in the US where a fetus is legally declared to be a person and where the murder statutes are written to not explicitly exclude abortion: that is, in no jurisdictions. No law existing or proposed for Georgia specifically addresses "travel for the purpose of getting an abortion". The underlying theory behind the claim (advocated by some Georgia attorneys) is that a person may be open to a conspiracy charge for taking a woman to another state to get an abortion, which would be a crime if committed in Georgia. If a conspiracy exists in Georgia to do something illegal (in Georgia), that is a violation of OCGA 16-4-8 ("when he together with one or more persons conspires to commit any crime and any one or more of such persons does any overt act to effect the object of the conspiracy"). The substantially same law exists in Washington, and most if not all other states. The theory is apparently that "conspire to commit a crime" means something like "conspire to perform an act which would be a crime if performed in in this jurisdiction", e.g. "purchase marijuana, or take a job at certain payday loan companies". No state has successfully claimed extraterritorial jurisdiction, where a Georgia resident can be prosecuted in Georgia for a legal act carried out in another state, so this theory is a bit of a stretch.
The short answer: No license is required in any U.S. jurisdiction to buy a firearm magazine. There are some jurisdictions that restrict the sale of "high-capacity" magazines to civilians. That's something that is changing often enough that any answer covering the U.S. will probably quickly be obsolete. Suffice it to say: If you can find it in a store there are no legal restrictions or conditions on purchasing it. Technically an "export" license might be required under ITAR to take magazines out of the country, but in practice this has not yet applied to individuals carrying low-tech small-arms accessories (in quantities reasonable for an individual's use).
There are several federal excise taxes on firearms. The main ones are (dispensing with the fine definitional details and Internal Revenue Code citations): A tax on transfers of firearms of $5 per concealable firearm and $200 per firearm on certain other firearms; a $500 per year firearm's dealers tax which is increased to $1000 if you import more than a certain number of firearms per year; a 10% of sales price excise tax on pistols and revolvers; and an 11% of sales price excise tax on other firearms and on ammunition. Of course, like any other business, firearm's dealers also have to file annual income tax returns on their revenues less their expenses on tax forms that depend upon the form of organization of the business (e.g. C-corporation, S-corporation, partnership/LLC, trust, etc.). The IRS has the right to examine the books and records of people who owe or are believed to owe taxes without going to a court to obtain permission to do so. Treas. Reg. § 1.601.105. Subject to certain exceptions, information obtained by the IRS in a review of a taxpayers records and their return information are confidential. 26 U.S.C. § 6103. There are criminal penalties for (slightly over simplifying) tax offenses including willfully failing to keep records necessary to file tax returns, willfully attempting to evade or defeat taxes, willfully failing to collect and pay taxes where required by law to do so, and willfully making false statements to IRS employees or on returns. 26 U.S.C. § 7201-7212. If the government provides probable cause to a federal judge or magistrate in connection with a possible criminal tax prosecution that there is probable cause to believe that a taxpayer has committed a criminal tax offense, then the government may obtain a search warrant to seize records without the advanced notice available in the usual civil record examination process. For example (not based on any facts I have been told about or read about in this particular case), suppose that a former employee of a firearm's dealer or an ex-spouse of one of the owners of the business, told the IRS that the dealer intentionally lied on their excise tax return by underreporting the number of firearms the dealer sold and that the dealer then kept the sales taxes collected from unreported buyers who completed Form 4473, and told the IRS criminal division investigators where the Form 4473s were kept at the dealer's offices. In that case, it would be routine for the IRS to obtain a federal search warrant to obtain those forms to seize and review in connection with an excise tax fraud investigation. If there was just an income tax audit, bank records and accounting records obtained by subpoena from banks and accountants would usually be sufficient. But this would cease to be the case if the inventory records obtained by subpoena from the dealer's suppliers, for example, and the accounting records, didn't match. If there was evidence of unreported firearm sales income, or of unreported excise taxable sales, the IRS would usually need to compare the the Form 4473s of the business to its income and excise tax returns filed with the IRS. It would be routine to obtain these records with a search warrant rather than a civil office record review with advanced notice if tax fraud was suspected. The Form 4473s due to IRS confidentiality requirements, wouldn't be publicly available to anyone by the IRS and criminal investigators (not even members of Congress or local law enforcement), and would probably only be presented in redacted or summary forms in a criminal tax fraud prosecution at trial. In all likelihood, the IRS doesn't care about the customers who filled out the Form 4473s at all, and isn't even bothering to investigate them (except possibly to spot check for fake social security numbers or names, which appear on the forms, to see if fake information was used to Form 4473s used to substantiate tax records). Instead, the IRS is probably simply tallying them up and noting dates of sale, putting them in a spreadsheet, and seeing if they are different from what was reported to the IRS on the dealer's tax returns. If the dealer, for example, paid the proper excise taxes on 800 guns in 2022, but had 1200 Form 4473s in banker's boxes at its offices, then the people involved in the tax fraud at the dealership are probably going to go to federal prison for a few years. Indeed, they would probably just plead guilty rather than going through a futile trial where documents with their own signatures on them from boxes seized in their shop clearly establish their guilt in that case. Federal firearm excise tax fraud prosecutions aren't terribly common, but they are about as plain vanilla as they come in the world of federal criminal prosecutions. This certainly doesn't portend any threat the Second Amendment rights or any crack down on the firearms industry. In terms of this message this sends, this is really no different that seizing the electronic records of a gas station that filed false gasoline excise tax returns to show how much gasoline was actually sold, and prosecuting the people who engaged in the tax fraud for that. The argument that a Form 4473 isn't a &quot;financial record&quot;, when it provides documentation of all of the information except the price on all of the dealer's firearm sales (Manufacturer, Model, Serial Number, Type of Firearm, Caliber or Gauge, number of firearms sold, and check boxes for tax exemptions), and the fact the some of the federal firearm excise taxes due don't even depend upon the price of the firearm, isn't a very strong one. Even if the search warrant didn't single out Forms 4473s from other kinds of business records, this would probably just be harmless error, because the IRS absolutely has the right to ask for and seize Form 4473s in connection with the tax fraud investigation, just like any other business record of a firm suspected of not paying its taxes. These records aren't protected by any evidentiary privilege in a federal tax fraud prosecution. Also, combined with past sales fliers and catalogues and business records about sales pricing for different products from the dealer in its accounting records, it would be fairly trivial to use this information to recreate a very accurate forensic reconstruction of the gross firearm sales revenues of the dealer and the amount of excise taxes that should have been paid. It would be tedious work, but it would be extremely damning evidence of tax fraud if the estimated sales significantly exceeds the sales reported on the dealer's tax returns. Even if the some of the documents in a particular banker's box aren't within the scope of the search warrant (for example, perhaps someone put Christmas Cards and as well as accounting ledgers and cancelled checks in the same box), the IRS would not be beyond its rights to grab all of the banker's boxes of documents, review them at their leisure in a government office, and then return the contents of the boxes that turned out to be something other than what the IRS requested a search warrant to seize. A good faith belief that the boxes seized has some financial records in them would justify taking them away, reviewing their contents, and returning materials that were beyond the scope of what was sought. The IRS criminal division agents don't have to look through the many, many banker's boxes page by page at the dealer's place of business to screen them at that time at that level of detail. Similarly, the IRS agents are not required to assume that boxes actually contain what the label on the outside of the box says that the box contains. Of course, if the Form 4473s corroborate the tax returns filed by the dealer apart from minor clerical errors or uncertainties about the exact sales prices of sales reported on them due to irregular discounts provided by a dealer who sometimes haggled over the prices of used firearms, the dealer would be vindicated and the informant who triggered the investigation and prosecution (if there is evidence that this informant willfully lied to IRS investigators) might even be prosecuted for making an intentionally false report to a law enforcement officer. The dealer wouldn't be entitled to reimbursement for criminal defense expenses or harm to the dealer's reputation, but it would still be a huge PR coup and the criminal charges would go away, probably long before a trial was even held. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen absolutely knows all of the facts in the post above. His claimed fear of a crackdown on gun users is something he is doing to willfully mislead the people of Montana for political gain. He may also be throwing stones at federal prosecutions because he was irritated that the IRS and Justice Department didn't keep him in the loop on this tax investigation in his state which he sees as his turf, even though it was purely a matter of federal tax law violations which his office didn't have jurisdiction over. Indeed, the IRS may have kept him in the dark and out of the loop from this investigation, in part, in order to protect taxpayer and gun owner privacy by not sharing confidential IRS investigation information with state law enforcement officers, something that it is not allowed to do.
Chain of custody and testimony in this regard. Say there is a murder victim, with DNA of the suspect under the fingernails and a knife with the suspect's bloody fingerprints stuck in the chest. There would be testimony what happened to the knife. If a paramedic removed it to attempt first aid, the paramedic would testify. So would the officer who bagged it, and the forensic analyst who took the fingerprints. A pathologist would testify if the knife was consistent with the stab wound (a careful pathologist could never swear that the knife was the cause of death, just that it matches). The pathologist would also testify how DNA was collected under the fingernails, and how it was sent to the lab. The defense may claim that the suspect also tried first aid, or that a corrupt cop forced the suspect to hold the knife. The court or jury then draw their conclusions from this and other testimony. Same here. A lifelike picture found on the web proves nothing. A witness who takes the stand to testify that he or she took a certain picture would be more credible. So would a forensic officer who testifies how she or he removed the data from a surveillance camera, checked for common signs of tampering, and then signed a copy of the data with a private key. (The signing shows no third-party tampering after collection, it is not evidence of integrity before that.) Years ago, in germany, there was the case of a bank robber who claimed that a fleeing suspect had handed him a bag of money in the forest and then vanished. &quot;Prove it wasn't so,&quot; he demanded. &quot;You can't. So there is reasonable doubt.&quot; Well, the court found that the statement merely created unreasonable doubt, and the sentence was upheld on appeal.
Although the USA don't like it, there's a department called INTERPOL which is composed by about 150 countries. When a crime is committed and you need to involve another country to solve it, the sovereignty of each County prevents a police officer from one country acting upon another country. That's when the INTERPOL comes in. They usually requests the police from that country to act up. A judge from that country will grant their local police access to the data to be delivered to the country that requested it. Can the police get a search warrant for data 'in the cloud'? Yes. If the servers are located within the boundaries of your own country, it's a normal procedure. But like the above answer states, it's easier to subpoena the records than to execute a search warrant. In a subpoena, the company itself is bound to provide everything the police asks. Can the police get a search warrant for such third party systems? Yes. If there's enough probable cause, the investigation can lead to allow the police to try and discover files that are held by servers that store the cloud data. But if the servers are located outside the country and the company does not have any office opened in the country, a search warrant won't have validity in another jurisdiction and the police can't act without breaking the sovereignty principle. That's where the INTERPOL services are handy. The department is built in the principle of polices from different countries helping each other. The downside is that it's too bureaucratic and it takes a lot of time. For instance if he has a virtual machine hosted by Amazon, would they serve the warrant on Amazon, or on the suspect? Like mentioned by @Viktor, if the company has an office within the bounds of your country, it's easier to subpoena the records because that way the company will filter and provide only the data linked to the suspect being investigated. That is, the subpoena will have both the name of the company (Amazon) and the name of the Suspect, so the company can provide only the necessary files. Update If the police lack sufficient evidence for a search warrant, but an interpol country was, for some reason, willing to work with the police to collect and provide that information would they be able to use it even if they wouldn't have been able to subpoena a US country? Hypothetically speaking, I see your follow-up as a company that do have a local office and the Federal Police was turned down by a judge on a warrant/subpoena. In that case, there's no reason for another's country police to act on their own country. The suspect is a foreign suspect, the crime is a foreign crime and the police has no reason to work on it. But for the sake of argument, let's say that the local police was turned down by a judge for lack of evidence or something and the suspect has been investigated by a foreign country or whatever. If the information that the local police desires to obtain is available through the INTERPOL, it's most likely to be accepted since it's a data stored by an international police department. In your scenario, the foreign police was granted a legal right to search and collected the data for legal purpose. Maybe they can't use it in their own country, but since they followed a safe chain of custody and provided the information to the INTERPOL, that information has legal validity and it is not fruit of the poisonous tree if the chain of custody was maintained.
There are several elements working in your friend's favor. The first is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." In an entrapment case, the police have recordings or documents claiming that the "girl" was underaged. If there is no such smoking gun from the (real) girl, the case (probably) would not be prosecuted in the U.S. He doesn't have to prove that she told him she was 18; "she" (or the police) has to prove that she told him she was "not." The second factor is "remoteness" in time, and distance. Two years after a U.S. state sent me a "nasty letter," I asked my lawyer if the state would ever come after me. He answered, "If they were going to do this, you would have heard further by now." The other factor, distance and cross border, (three countries: Turkey, the U.S., his home country) further militates against prosecution except for highly aggravating circumstances such as drug dealing, gambling, or sex for pay. A third factor is that your friend would not come close to qualifying as a "serious offender." This would be someone like a drug dealer, or the head of a "call girl" ring. The cops concentrate their effects on big "busts" like this that make their careers, not "small fry" like your friend. But of course they use the publicity from the big catches to scare everyone else. While there is no "guarantee" against "the worst possible consequences," the chances of them happening are similar to his getting hit by lightening, and less than his chances of being hit by a car crossing the street. No one stresses out about those chances. He shouldn't either. I am not a lawyer but I have done paralegal work in a law office.