26 Apr
2005
26 Apr
'05
7:20 a.m.
At 07:01 PM 4/25/05 -0700, you wrote:
I've heard (second hand) that they have but none of the ones that I deal
with have.
Can you get them to show you any paperwork they received
Any
thoughts on this?
Yes. My thought is that if you walk into the surplus joint in person,
and negotiate the purchase of a piece of equipment that is sitting there,
the federal government has no power (constitutional authority) to
prevent the sale, since it is not interstate commerce.
And you could probably spend twenty years and millions of dollars trying
to fight it. :-(
It sounds fishy to me. Have any other local surplus dealers said anything
similar? notifying them of this requirement, or tell you what
law (U.S. Code) or
Regulation (Code of Federal Regulations) they're complying with? It's
not like the government can just impose something like this without any
official paperwork.
I just went and looked at the listing of items for the most recent
auction at KSC and it does say that "export control and/or DeMil may apply
to SOME items". There's nothing new in that. The last auction that I went
to had that but it was only applied to some military and aircraft parts.
The question is weather some bureaucrat is over reacting and imposing it on
everything or weather this dealer is over reacting. One thing to keep in
mind however is that this guy is primarily a metal recycler and he buys
stuff by the TON. He gets thousands if not tens of thousands of electronic
cards/assemblies/units so tracking everyone really is an absolute
impossiblity for him. And that's just the electonics items. If he has to
track everything then multiply that times 50!
It seems more likely that the one dealer has decided that he doesn't
want to hassle with the public any more, and is trying to shift the
blame to the government.
I don't think so. This guy only lets in people that he knows and trust
so he's not dealing with the average idiot off the street. (please, no
comments asking how I got in! :-) His "customers" always pay in cash and
don't ask for guarantees or reciepts and he enjoys having the extra
spending money.
BTW speaking of things that shouldn't have been let out by Uncle Sam,
one of the more interesting things that I've found there was a Gatling Gun
from an A-10!! He knew what it was and wouldn't
sell it :-( He bought it
along with a crashed A-10 for scrap metal. They told him
that it was a
hydraulic pump of some kind!!!
Joe
Eric