Just roll the clip.
M16’s, ladies and gentlemen. Still in the crate and all of their select-fire fun still intact… What a find! The Texas couple had these delivered to their home ready packed. Some private somewhere, told to be decommissioning these crates for surplus, and their NCO are about to catch merry hell. The armory who are supposed to be in custody of these, and it might be contracted out too so a civilian agency woops, are going to have their books tossed by DoD and ATF as applicable.
Fun times.
To be fair, very fair, to the couple who bought the alleged surplus crates and only crates, getting found with missing military weapons that you just ‘didn’t get around to filing a report for’ after finding them would court all kinds of legal troubles. The ATF would probably be sympathetic, as they seem to be in this case, up to a point but that failure to report would likely result a charge or few. Probably a single violation of the NFA, depending upon how cooperative you were after discover, and that single violation can still catch you a 10 year prison term.
Not fun.
Still, the temptation to just not make too much noise about a find like that would be substantial. Those appear to be M16A2′ and those are largely decommissioned rifles pulled from all forms of duty. So they got fumbled in transit somewhere noncritical going to somewhere else noncritical since the military is fielded up with M4’s, A4’s, M4A1’s, and M27’s at the moment. No unit needing rifles would be missing these rifles, these are meant to sit dusty as an Indiana Jones artifact taken into government custody by “top men” and lost.
Which is exactly how the couple got them in the first place, they got lost in the .gov transportation pipes. That happens, a lot more than you would think. Just google search how many nukes we are missing.
Or don’t. It’s not a confidence inspiring number, nor how they went missing.
