....is, or is not, an "antique" firearm.
I decided to take a little look. I like the 'and' part. Hand grenades?
The case needs more than a "little look". The short version is he was charged - 2 separate charges - with having an unregistered sawed-off shotgun and unregistered destructive devices (the hand grenades). He defended the sawed-off shotgun charge by arguing it was an "antique" as defined in the statute. (He really didn't have much of a defense as to the grenades.)
The dispute over the shotgun was not whether it was pre-1899 - there was consensus it was made sometime between 1870 and 1883. Rather, it was over whether the fact it could fire 12 gauge ammunition while only being marked 18.2 (mm, the common Belgian mark of bore diameter) meant it was not an antique because it could use modern ammunition. The judges decided the statute was "vague" (in the lawyerly sense) because it could be read both in favor of the government's position and in favor of the defendant's position. Because they decided the statute was "vague" they had to toss his conviction on the sawed-off shotgun count. (Note that the 2nd Circuit had previously decided the statute was not "vague", deciding it in favor of the government's position.)
That didn't change much for him, though, because the conviction on the grenade count stood up. Because he would have gotten the same sentence for just the grenade conviction as he did for both the grenade and the sawed-off shotgun counts, he got no relief (other than a decrease in an assessment from $200 to $100). He still got the same 46 months in prison.
