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You mean, he was deliberately following the law by the letter, making sure to never break it, and the feds murdered him in a pre-dawn raid anyway. Either he broke the law or he didn't. Skirting the law isn't breaking the law, otherwise you'd have said he broke it.
The ATF deserves to be disbanded, and most of their employees tried for crimes against the constitution and the people who it protects.
As OP writes it, the law is ambiguous. Hence "skirting the law" does not mean "carefully staying inside the bright red lines", it means "nobody knows if you're breaking the law until you're in court".
If you want to argue he clearly wasn't breaking the law then I'd be legitimately happy to read it, but right now I'm leaning towards "law makers trying to make it legal for you to sell your grandpa's private collection when he dies probably weren't trying to make it legal to buy and sell 150 guns, with no extenuating circumstances, in two years".
And yet, we are going to have more cases like this in time, I imagine, if they're not already happening, purely because the former will be indistinguishable from the latter, given the habits of gun owners (to speak more plainly: older people probably buy a lot of guns, thus, it is quite conceivable that a family that needs to ditch paw-paw's little arsenal might run afoul of the ATF through no genuine fault of their own).
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