Legal question...

[Guest S7A2G6]

Recently came up in discussion...

Adding a fore-grip with spring loaded bi-pod, to a semi auto pistol. Attached to the rail. Old illegal law, or still illegal?

[dralarms]

Adding a grip to the front of a pistol make sit an AOW and you must pay a tax fee on it.

[MacGyver]

There was a case in 1993 where the ATF busted someone for putting a forward grip on a pistol, but they dropped the case after a court said that it was not an AOW. Since the ATF dropped the case, no precedent was set.

In 2006, the ATF sent a letter to FFL holders stating that they were still interpreting the law their way. As such, unless you want to be a test case, I would fill out the form 1.

Adding a Vertical Fore Grip to a Handgun

I'm going to move this to the NFA subforum so that Jasongar8 will be sure to see it. He would know better than anyone.

[Guest crotalus01]

after a court said that it was not an AOW.

Would this not set precedent? The court obviously made some kind of ruling that resulted in the ATF dropping the charges.

[MacGyver]

Unfortunately since they dropped the charges, there was nothing for the court to actually set a precedent on. I'm sure that if someone gets busted for it in the future that this ruling will come up.

I was thinking about this the other night as it relates to the MP5-K variants. Of course those are NFA items, so owners can run whatever they want on them. However, from there I made the leap to the GSG-5-PK, and a google image search shows plenty of people seemingly running those with forward pistol grips. This would seem to be in opposition to the letter. We could see some test cases out there.