Feds pull plug on domains linked to import of Chinese gun conversion devices The US Attorney's Office in the District of Massachusetts has seized more than 350 internet domains allegedly used by Chinese outfits to sell US residents kits that convert semiautomatic pistols into fully automatic guns – and silence them as they fire. The prosecutors stated that possession of the silencers and the conversion …
WSJ today - House Democrats called on President Biden to end a U.S. trade provision that has been boon for China’s e-commerce companies and drawn criticism from some who argue that the rule is an unfair and potentially dangerous loophole. A majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives signed a letter sent Wednesday that called for quick executive action to address what is known as the de minimis provision in U.S. trade law, which lets shipments valued at $800 or less enter the country with relatively little scrutiny.
Amazon (via the "National Foreign Trade Council", which despite the name, is just a business lobbying group) hates the idea of even weakening the the de minimis provision. Therefore, it must be a good idea.
Just because a provision is beneficial to one corporation that does not mean repealing it will necessarily be beneficial to the individual. The jobs created by repealing de minimis will not be manufacturing but rather a handful of warehouse workers at corporations that are large enough to maintain an inventory stateside, taking advantage of the economies of scale on import processing fees.
While Amazon likely profits more from de minimis, they are still well placed to be a major player in profiting off a repeal, as they currently are in Europe, because their warehouses and ability to harvest purchase data for predictive inventory management gives them an edge over smaller businesses. For very specialist items which are too niche for large corporations to care about, the consumer ends up paying more in processing fees than actual duties.
@Catkin, With respect I don't think you understand. Repealing the de minimus provision isn't about making things better for big business, it's simply to close a loophole exploited by many unscrupulous mostly Chinese businesses to offload dangerous, illegal, unsafe or simply non-compliant goods to Western markets. It's not just gun modifications, it's cosmetics with dangerous ingredients, its small drugs shipments, it's dodgy electricals that could electrocute people or catch fire, it's plastic, clothing, footwear items with (eg) illegal levels of plasticisers, toys that don't meet US/UK/EU safety standards, untested and uncertified life jackets, jewellery that contains harmful levels of heavy metals. I could go on, you get the picture.
Now, there's three elements to how this arrives on Western markets. First up, we have the shitty irresponsible online marketplaces - including the big ones beginning with Am, Al and eB, but also the myriad of smaller shyster marketplaces. They'll list almost anything no matter how untested, unsafe, unreliable, crappy (until stopped by threat of enforcement action) and then maintain they're not part of the supply chain until a court says otherwise. For online marketplaces that don't have a local legal presence, and where goods are shipped by post it's nigh on impossible to force them to do anything as there's no "attack surface".
Second up, we have China's status as a poor country under Universal Postal Union rules. Whilst there's been some modest changes, it is still the case that smaller packages can be sent from China to the West at less than the actual cost, with the balance picked up by the receiving postal service. Essentially, the postal services of the US, Canada, UK, Australia, the EU are subsidising Chinese companies to send illegal, dangerous, and poor quality tat to our markets.
Third, by using postal services, in addition to the de minimus provision reducing duties collected, it creates a further flaw than the subsidy, in that it isn't feasible for border authorities to inspect every postal package*, and in fact very few are. Content on the customs declaration label is routinely mis-described to evade duties, or to misrepresent illegal goods. There's some scanning of incoming post for firearms, explosives, drugs, but that isn't wholly effective and also doesn't look for everything that we should stop. And there's little in the way of monitoring and recording individual postal packages, so it's an easy route for repeated non-compliance.
So your niece perhaps thinks she's got a lovely piece of silver jewellery on the cheap from the internet, in reality it's nasty and harmful, without hallmarking or quality controls, with maybe as much silver content as the foil wrapper on a bar of chocolate:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63c7211cd3bf7f5809820ef3/2212-0067-psr-jewllery.pdf
Now, if UPU were all strangled and fair pricing adopted, then it would be uneconomic for overseas suppliers to ship small packages unless they're high value. Much as I despise Trump, he at least recognised the UPU failings and got some changes enacted under threat of withdrawing the US from the UPU. The elimination of the de minimus duty rules at least means there's no exemption suppliers can hide behind. If together with further UPU reform, it would (rightly) become uneconomic for commercial suppliers to do small shipments, and they'd have to do what legit businesses do - consignment shipping. So instead of coming in hidden amongst the postcards, letters, genuine gifts, second hand items sold by genuine private sellers, those goods would need to come in a legitimate freight consignment. That has proper customs declaration, tracking and clearance, and needs a local presence or fulfilment house. Trade consignments are risk assessed and traceable, they are subject to inspections. Problem suppliers, problem goods, or consignees associated with either can be risk flagged so that their consignments are regularly inspected, and non-complaint, unsafe or illegal goods can be seized and destroyed, and there's a legal attack service in the receiving country. If fulfilment houses find that regulators, border authorities and customs officers are routinely disrupting their operations (and if need be penalising them) they'll start to get the message. And higher levels of seizures of non-compliant goods would discourage disreputable suppliers. Lower incoming postal volumes would improve the quality of scanning for drugs, firearms etc within the post system - wouldn't eliminate all that, but would be a useful improvement.
The only small businesses the current rules help, is non-compliant overseas businesses.
AC as I work as a regulator in this area, albeit not in the US.
* Some nations, eg UAE do do physical inspection of everything coming in. This is very slow, very expensive, and would be seen as massive and unacceptable government intrusion in democratic countries.
Depends what you want.
For starters, properly declared and shipped consignments aren't going to multiply the costs of some tat ten-fold. Container shipping is perhaps an innovation that's passed you by?
Also, given the tsunami of dangerous, non-compliant tat, the rampant duty evasion, and the harm to Western businesses that can't compete with Chinese companies that don't comply with regulations, lie about their wares to avoid paying duties agreed by your government, and are unintentionally subsidised by your domestic postal service......are those entirely acceptable outcomes just so you you can get your fix of cheap tat?
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I probably wasn't clear and didn't mean that it's a ploy to make more money for big business, I meant that it's not wholly against their interests to repeal it.
For the sake of transparency, I should say that I'm a hobbyist tinkerer and getting things like machine parts from aliexpress and similar lets me affordably pursue my hobbies. I remember the dark days before these sites got the ability to pay their customs, you could often end up paying Royal Mail more for the privilege than the value of the customs or, sometimes, more than the base value of the item if they were feeling particularly loopy (for mistakes, you had a choice of paying or returning, which works for big businesses leaving RM holding the can for the customs payment but is greatly imbalanced against the individual). The alternative was a UK importer/stockist, who would often charge an outrageous markup (because the item was too niche even for Maplin/RS) or lumping it because your requirement was beyond the point of commercial viability for a business to import and stock.
I personally equate buying silver earrings off those sites to buying them off a guy at the pub or out the back of a white van: if they're selling 'silver' jewellery below the market rate of base silver, it feels like it's on the buyer. I suppose there is self-interest there but it does feel a bit like hobbyists being told that their hobbies are less important than someone who can't think critically before paying for tat.
I am not an expert, and you suggest that you know a lot more than I do, but I'm not sure all the problems you've named are related to the provision they're talking about. For one thing, how much the UPU says shipping a box should cost seems wholly unrelated to whether customs will scrutinize the box. You could remove China from the list of countries whose shipping gets subsidized without affecting this provision at all. I think doing that makes sense, but by bringing it up, you have slightly harmed your other points because that seems unrelated.
The other problem with your description is that many of the things that we want to buy from China don't come in bulk in a container because not that many of them are made. If they are custom design or low-volume items, then they won't bother to have a local distributor or warehouse, make enough that they can have local supplies wherever their customers might be, etc. They might, but probably won't, do that for the United States in the hope that hundreds of millions of customers might make it realistic. That's definitely not going to happen in small countries, which will find it almost impossible to buy the things in the first place. We have to balance that against the problems of dangerous or counterfeit goods sent one at a time, but I'm not sure that should always come on the side of making small shipments infeasible for everyone.
Or the small items are sold by the overseas seller, who sends them to a company that imports large amounts of various goods and then ships them in the US after arrival. That company would be on the hook for any dangerous or counterfeit goods they import, making them much more likely to scrutinize the companies that are shipping through them, and thus decreasing the dangerous and counterfeit goods coming into the US.
The only downside I see is shipping costs would go up. I always wondered why it was cheaper to ship a small package from China to my doorstep than from my house to someone else in the US. I didn't know it was subsidized.
That's where it would stop working. If I want to import a small item, I have to find a company willing to resell it to me, get the manufacturer in China to sell it to an exporter, the exporter to put it in a shipping container, the container to be passed by customs even though it probably contains a thousand individual packages with different things in them, wait for my distributor to sort out my package, charge me their markup for the action of receiving a box off a ship, then send it the rest of the way. None of that is at all related to the price of sending boxes through the mail. That's the point that the original post inaccurately conflated with the rest of the regulations, because it is entirely independent of the rest of this. Others have described what happens when you have this company in the middle. Either you can't get an item, you can only get it from someone who has applied a 200% markup on it because they're the only person who has imported a box of them and you can't manage it yourself, and you certainly can't use whatever supplier you want because, if you're lucky enough to find someone importing them, they've already decided on one supplier.
There are two problems that are worth solving. One is that we're paying more than China does for sending packages. That's worth fixing, and although it's a tricky diplomatic experience, it's unrelated to the rest of this. The second is the existence of dangerous products. Given all the dangerous products stored in bulk locally in Amazon warehouses, the customs exceptions for small packages isn't a simple answer to that problem either. Most likely, there will still be dangerous items and we won't make a dent in them unless we spend a lot more money in individual enforcement actions against their sellers.
Depending on the location, it can be more severe than that. Usually, it's written to "if they would not have committed the crime without the actions by law enforcement". The US can be one of the stronger countries for it, where entrapment has been redefined to "if their lawyer can argue that they would not have done this without the police involvement". That's not a guarantee that that would work, but almost certainly, most of the people arrested for using the fake site would try the argument.
Given the US is so awash with guns, a few kits to convert semi automatics to automatics is a drop in the ocean. Especially when there's plenty of instructions out there on how to do it *
* I'm not in US, but dabbled with 3D printing a while ago & whilst browsing through 3D printing content that people had posted online looking for interesting projects, I could not help notice a lot was gun related (I'm from a place with quite strict gun laws, UK, so gun content really seemed odd)
I'm in the US, gun ownership or just walking around town with a few guns in your packets is normal everywhere. Locally we claim to be safe - only about a dozen people are shot every week. Yes that sounds bad in the UK (I visit every year) but locally for me all the shooting is in other areas around the town, not where I live.
I expect that the Chinese action is just a result of them listening to Americans talking on social media, no Chinese are getting shot locally because they are all just running good restaurants.
90% occur in a single demographic, killing that same demographic with illegally obtained firearms. (pistols, not those scary black, "assault weapons").
Laws will not stop this and the political party, hell bent of trampling the rights of law abiding gun owners, has no interest in stopping this.
These things are illegal here in the US. Not just because of the Automatic operation but because they are seriously dangerous. They convert a pistol to what is called a slam-fire firearm. Very prone to catastrophic malfunction which can seriously injure of kill the operator.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
