This is huge. The ATF generally shies away from making hard determinations on anything so they can enforce pretty much whatever they want, but recently they painted themselves into a corner.
The 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) laid out all the different entities that are allowed to own firearms, such as individuals, corporations, and most importantly to this case trusts. The 1986 machinegun ban says everything the NFA includes, with the exception of trusts, cannot possess post-1986 machineguns without being on the special list. It''s always been assumed that trusts really aren't any different from "persons".
Recently, in regards to background checks the ATF has determined that trusts are not "persons". Therefore, the wording of the 1986 machinegun ban does not prevent trusts from possessing or making new machineguns. Once this realization came about, people starting filing form 1's to build new machineguns as trusts.
For a while, these stamps were being approved :fuckyeah:
It's not known how many were approved, but it's been confirmed that there have been machineguns legally built on these stamps. Someone at the ATF decided this was a bad idea, and now they aren't approving these form 1 requests.
So now, there is a pro-2a lawyer that has filed 3 lawsuits in different states. His goal is to shatter the entire machinegun ban through the courts.
I think you can all figure out just how massive and important this is to clawing back our rights, and laying the groundwork to saving them for years to come. Without a massive change in the makeup of our federal legislature, there will be no laws any time soon made in regards to this whatsoever. So whatever the courts decide is what we'll have for the foreseeable future.
AR15.com has a massive thread on this, and has all the info updated in the original post. There is also info on donating the cause. If you are able, please do. At this point there is no real reason to submit your own form 1 unless you would like to be a part of a possible class action suit in the future if this doesn't pan out. It will be auto-rejected within 3 days.
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1624460_.html
Feel free to copy-paste this to any other gun forums you are on. The more people that know about this, the better.
News article on it here