ATF is doing a bang up job keeping guns out of the hands of thugs.
Via Guns
An Illinois military museum has managed to save a historic machine gun, captured by an area Marine during World War II– but only after a local sheriff rescued it from the ATF first.
The Livingston County War Museum in Pontiac last week placed their newly-acquired Type 99 light machine gun on public display, surrounded by photos and memorabilia that once belonged to the man who brought it home from Iwo Jima.
That Marine, John Sullivan, helped silence the weapon in 1945– attested by the damage visible on the bipod and carrying handle of the 23-pound 7.7mm machine gun.[…]
Breaking the gun down into three sub-assemblies, the serviceman shipped the gun back home labeled as “shrapnel,” then reassembled it and placed it on display for over three decades over his bar until one day in 1981 when the law came looking for the weapon.
Responding to an anonymous call, an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms came to Sullivan’s home along with a LaSalle County Sheriff’s deputy and collected the gun.
Telling law enforcement at the time, “do you know how many Marines were killed with that gun?” as related by LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton. “He said ‘I’m the one who silenced it, I brought it back, and its mine.’”[…]
The solution worked out in 1981 to keep the gun local was that the sheriff’s office would take custody of the Type 99, placing it in their arsenal.
Sullivan, who passed away in 1990, never was able to get his gun back but Templeton, knowing the Marine wanted it displayed, contacted the area museum about donating the firearm, which went on display this week.
“Thank You to the Museum and its staff by honoring my father, John Sullivan, United States Marine Corps, WWII, for preserving this machine gun that he captured in Battle,” Jane Sullivan-DePaoli noted on the museum’s social media account last weekend.
The museum, founded and run by veterans, is open seven days a week and admission is free.