Larry Vickers

Dale Gribble

Dale Gribble

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North Carolina and North Dakota Police Chiefs and Federal Firearms Licensees Indicted for Conspiracy to Illegally Acquire Machineguns and Other Firearms - Soldier Systems Daily

Baltimore, Maryland – A federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging five defendants with a conspiracy to illegally acquire machineguns and other regulated firearms. Charged in the indictment, which was unsealed yesterday are: Sean Reidpath Sullivan, age 38, of Gambrills, Maryland...
soldiersystems.net


They’ll go after him, although there was no crime victim, yet the same organization who went after him is the same organization that facilitated the transfer of weapons to the cartels….one or more of which was used to murder a USBP Agent….and no one is held accountable.

FATF.😡😡😡😡😡
 

North Carolina and North Dakota Police Chiefs and Federal Firearms Licensees Indicted for Conspiracy to Illegally Acquire Machineguns and Other Firearms - Soldier Systems Daily

Baltimore, Maryland – A federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging five defendants with a conspiracy to illegally acquire machineguns and other regulated firearms. Charged in the indictment, which was unsealed yesterday are: Sean Reidpath Sullivan, age 38, of Gambrills, Maryland...
soldiersystems.net


Yes this is the Larry Vickers.
 
You beat me by like 2 seconds.

I don't like the NFA either but damn, everyone of these guys should have known this was dangerous. Using law letters to get rare and uncommon guns to make YouTube videos without even following though on demonstrating the gun to the agency that wrote the letter is not smart.
 
So if he had actually done demonstrations to those depts, could he then have kept them legally?
 
Diverdad said:
That

That’s what I got out of it but I don’t play in the NFA world.
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Me neither. Just seems like a simple requirement for a guy that likes shooting guns. Hell id demonstrate full autos for them until they told me to go home. Id also film it, make a YouTube channel, and get monetized so that i got paid for doing it. Sounds kinda like a dream job. Hard to believe he skipped the simple and fun step of shooting for the guys that approved the purchase. Maybe I'm missing something. I'm no nfa guy either.
 
I'll bet Vickers' argument is that he's "the Larry Vickers" and his youtube content is watched by all sorts of law enforcement people, so by publishing videos and making it known that he can acquire/sell, he's doing exactly what he said he was gonna do.
And I think that's VERY true.
 
DrScaryGuy said:
I'll bet Vickers' argument is that he's "the Larry Vickers" and his youtube content is watched by all sorts of law enforcement people, so by publishing videos and making it known that he can acquire/sell, he's doing exactly what he said he was gonna do.
And I think that's VERY true.
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Says he pled guilty.
 
Prudii said:
Well it'd probably have been far harder for the government to prove the fraud charges.
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Oh i agree. Just baffles me how a guy in his 60's whose been in the industry for forever got caught up over a requirement that was so easy for him to knock out given his daily job.

I wonder if those vickers glocks are gonna skyrocket in price.
 
Mr. Bggs said:
I wonder if those vickers glocks are gonna skyrocket in price.
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I got a safe full of them. No lowballers. I know what I got.

In reality, they're just a second release of the 2009-2010 RTF2 Glocks without any fish gill option. They had a few Vickers Tactical aftermarket parts, but overall they're not that special.
 
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Gaston said:
I got a safe full of them. No lowballers. I know what I got.

In reality, they're just a second release of the RTF2 2009-2010 RTF2 Glocks without any fish gill option. They had a few Vickers Tactical aftermarket parts, but overall they're not that special.
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That's actually more than i thought was done to them. I just thought it was his name on a stock gun.
 
Prudii said:
You beat me by like 2 seconds.

I don't like the NFA either but damn, everyone of these guys should have known this was dangerous. Using law letters to get rare and uncommon guns to make YouTube videos without even following though on demonstrating the gun to the agency that wrote the letter is not smart.
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Mr. Bggs said:
Oh i agree. Just baffles me how a guy in his 60's whose been in the industry for forever got caught up over a requirement that was so easy for him to knock out given his daily job.
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It seriously makes you wonder what he was thinking or not thinking about. The guy played with fire for a living but forgot to wear fire proof shoes and got burned and we're suppose to blame the fire. Dude, you'd think it was common sense to dot your i's and cross your t's if you play with guns for a living AND show it to the world. Enjoy pleaing out I suppose.
 
Chuckman said:
I like him, I've had some of his classes, learned a lot, I have nothing but good things to say about him and his social media and YouTube.

I agree some of these charges seem spurious, and I am curious how pleading guilty is going to affect him.
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Says 5 years plus in Federal pen. Wonder if there is more that he doesn’t want to come up so he took a plea
 
For what it’s worth, Larry battled cancer through some of this period, as I recall.

Did the view of his mortality affect his perspective?

No idea.

I just think that whatever we speculate on the surface, there’s always more.

I lost touch with two very close friends later in life. Neither knew each other. They lived and did business two states apart. Both were convicted of six figure insurance fraud. Both had small businesses. Knowing both well, I expect in both cases it had much more to do with financial need, than financial greed.

That said, they both stepped way over the line, and got burned for it.
 
Radar said:
Says 5 years plus in Federal pen. Wonder if there is more that he doesn’t want to come up so he took a plea
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I read an article about it really fast and I'm stupid tired. Was he sentenced to 5 years or is that the possibility of sentencing?
 
Chuckman said:
I read an article about it really fast and I'm stupid tired. Was he sentenced to 5 years or is that the possibility of sentencing?
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from justice.gov, today

U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin has not yet scheduled sentencing for Vickers.
 
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That sucks. LAV was always super friendly at tradeshows. But, it sounds like he might have made some unwise choices.

There’s an old saying: Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.

The law letter system is an absolute crapshow of guys with 07/02s using a police chief/sheriff buddy to sign off on personal or shop collection guns.

The problem isn’t just that the guns never got demoed. If a department says it’s looking at one or two guns a year for training purposes, whether they actually do or not, that’s not going to raise any red flags.

Someone either put something very stupid in writing, and/or a police chief probably signed a few too many letters (a small department demoing five, ten, or more different MGs and subguns a year, every year, would raise eyebrows in West Virginia).
 
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JRV said:
Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.

The law letter system is an absolute crapshow of guys with 07/02s using a police chief/sheriff buddy to sign off on personal or shop collection guns.

The problem isn’t just that the guns never got demoed. If a department says it’s looking at one or two guns a year for training purposes, whether they actually do or not, that’s not going to raise any red flags.

Someone either put something very stupid in writing, and/or a police chief probably signed a few too many letters (a small department demoing five, ten, or more different MGs and sub guns a year, every year, would raise eyebrows in West Virginia).
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That makes more sense.
 
JRV said:
A police chief probably signed a few too many letters (a small department demoing five, ten, or more different MGs and subguns a year, every year, would raise eyebrows in West Virginia).
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"Vickers also pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against a foreign firearms manufacturer between July 2014 and March 2021, in the Southern District of Florida."

My bet is that this is what got the investigation started. It's one thing for Bob of Big Bob's Gun Emporium to get Chief Frank of Podunkville PD to write a law letter for a post sample M4. It's another to try and use a law letter to import a gun from Russia.
 
Prudii said:
My bet is that this is what got the investigation started. It's one thing for Bob of Big Bob's Gun Emporium to get Chief Frank of Podunkville PD to write a law letter for a post sample M4. It's another to try and use a law letter to import a gun from Russia.
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except that i snatched up my first 5.56 can from a guy in MI who got a bulk deal on them and sold like 95% of them to CA cops. While I was there doing paperwork, I got to play with an HK MP7. I have no idea what agency might have been trying to get an MP7, but he had at least one for demo, and he did enough demos/business with agencies that he gave up on selling things to the general public unless he knew you well enough to figure you worth the trouble.

This whole law letter world is a mess, but i want to get into it. I want to do it and just set up demos as a business expense. Let a few cops fire a couple mags and be on their way, log it in a book as a demo and buy something fun for myself.
 
ES44AC said:
It seems overkill on the charges when they will drop charges for Glock switches against local Hood Rats.... 😒 . Hood Rats kill people and get very light sentences.
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That was my thought exactly. I don’t think for a minute Vickers was doing anything of malicious intent.

There appear to be a fair amount of people who want to hang him for “he should have known better” and “he should be held to a higher bar.” I disagree simply because there are people in this country hellbent on harming others that get away with it all the time and have done nothing for this country.

I do think a fine and perhaps something like community service or a requirement for him to make a video on what not to do might be a fair punishment but not a felony conviction and jail time.
 
I think normal people should just start giving this corrupt, politically biased, two tiered legal system a royal bloody nose instead of submitting to it. Solzhenitsyn had the right idea. When going home after your shift isn’t guaranteed the job loses attraction real fast.
 
Damn. Just Damn. I long time ago in a galaxy far far away I regularly shot IPSC matches with LV, KL and DH. He was pretty cool dude back then. I found his TV shows educational and sometimes inspirational. I'm sorry to hear he ran afoul of the law. He did a interview on a TV show one time about his participation in the raid that broke a govt contractor out of a Panamanian prision. Hair raising stuff.
 
JRV said:
(a small department demoing five, ten, or more different MGs and subguns a year, every year, would raise eyebrows in West Virginia).
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The .gov website makes it sound like it started with hall and Sawyer getting letters from Coats NC. COATS IS TINY! 2200 people according to google. I drive through it on the way to the coast there is nothing lol.
 
I did some reading about this on ArfCom last night. It seems:

* Vickers and the others were idiots. He plead guilty as he clearly was guilty.

* Just because "everyone's always done this" with law letters, doesn't mean a vengeful ATF won't step in at some time.

* Issuing a ton of letters for NFA hardware from Coats (population 2,000) for NFA stuff is a red flag anyone could see would be responded to.

* Organizing an interstate criminal conspiracy via email/text is really stupid.

* Violating import sanctions is going to draw additional attention.

* LARPing around on YouTube showing off guns that could not have been legally imported from Russia before 2014 is not a good idea.

* There's more than a few people who have illegally imported items from Russia post-2014. That doesn't mean that someone's not going to be stapled to the wall for it eventually.

* Vickers et al could have likely avoided SOME of the charges had they just demoed the guns to *some* LEOs

* The ATF should be disbanded.
 
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Mack270 said:
That was my thought exactly. I don’t think for a minute Vickers was doing anything of malicious intent.
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Crimes don’t require malice. We can all agree that the NFA and various import laws are dumb and shouldn’t exist. Doesn’t mean someone should be allowed use their celebrity, reputation, or riches to flout laws in a way common people (like a small profile 07/02) never could.

Mack270 said:
There appear to be a fair amount of people who want to hang him for “he should have known better” and “he should be held to a higher bar.” I disagree simply because there are people in this country hellbent on harming others that get away with it all the time and have done nothing for this country.
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One thing has nothing to do with the other. Other people committing crimes or being dirtbags doesn’t cancel out crimes of people we like. You can serve your country and still commit crimes. You can say “yeah, they obviously should have known better and used better judgment” without being vindictive. And no one wanted or wants anything bad to happen to Larry. The question is whether he knowingly violated laws everyone else has to obey and did so in a blatant enough way that, after years of investigation, he pleaded guilty for the deal.

Mack270 said:
I do think a fine and perhaps something like community service or a requirement for him to make a video on what not to do might be a fair punishment but not a felony conviction and jail time.
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Would you want the same leniency for anyone else that isn’t a Delta vet or a YouTuber? That’s not how crimes work. In theory, you do the crime, you do the time.*

*Presidents, billionaires, and children of presidents excluded.
 
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DrScaryGuy said:
except that i snatched up my first 5.56 can from a guy in MI who got a bulk deal on them and sold like 95% of them to CA cops. While I was there doing paperwork, I got to play with an HK MP7. I have no idea what agency might have been trying to get an MP7, but he had at least one for demo, and he did enough demos/business with agencies that he gave up on selling things to the general public unless he knew you well enough to figure you worth the trouble.

This whole law letter world is a mess, but i want to get into it. I want to do it and just set up demos as a business expense. Let a few cops fire a couple mags and be on their way, log it in a book as a demo and buy something fun for myself.
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A law letter isn't an exception to sanctions.

The stuff about AK-12s has me concerned, those parts kits where coming and getting built by builders nation wide in pretty large numbers. I don't own one but a few have been posted by members here.
 
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