Orange Park man, YouTube celeb get prison for 'reckless' machine gun conversion device sales
An Orange Park business owner who sold thousands of illegal devices for converting semiautomatic rifles into machine guns will serve a 68-month prison sentence, a federal judge has decided.
A YouTube figure who promoted Kristopher “Justin” Ervin’s Auto Key Card to an audience of about 180,000 subscribers to his gun-themed social media channel will serve five years, U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard said in a sentencing that described the two men’s actions as “unlawful, dangerous [and] reckless.”
But the judge said the sentences were significantly less than federal guidelines prescribe and that attorneys for both the prosecution and defense could end up challenging her decision.
“I suspect that everyone will appeal and no one is satisfied with what I’ve done today,” she said Thursday.
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The sentence was distinctive because of the vast number of conversion devices — about 6,600, prosecutors said — that Ervin sold through more than 1,500 orders, placed largely after Ervin advertised his product on Wisconsin gun dealer Matthew Hoover’s YouTube channel, CRS Firearms.
The federal government treats conversion devices like machine guns that have to be registered and regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934.
After hiring services of a machine shop, Ervin sold card-shaped strips of stainless steel etched with patterns for equipment that some gun enthusiast call a “lightning link.” If a buyer followed the etched lines with a cutting tool, the shape that was cut could be inserted into a semiautomatic AR-15 to create a fully automatic machine gun.
A jury convicted the men in April of conspiracy and illegally transferring unregistered conversion devices, which federal law treats as equivalent to machine guns. Ervin, 43, was also convicted of a financial crime involving proceeds from his business.
Ahead of the sentencing, the court probation office had said sentencing guidelines suggested a term of no more than 41 months for Ervin and 33 months for Hoover, 39.
But prosecutors strongly objected, noting the guidelines recommend harsher sentences when crimes involved more firearms, topping out at a recommendation of around 10 to 12 years for cases involving more than 200 guns.
Emphasizing how exponentially greater 6,600 was than 200, they asked the judge for a variance that would have allowed a sentence as high as 24 years.
Ervin’s attorney, Alex King, had tried to argue that increased sentences for more guns was irrelevant to the count of Auto Key Cards. If 1,000 people were shown Auto Key Card strips, he said, “1,000 people would tell you that is not a firearm.”
“Except the 12 jurors” who found Ervin guilty, the judge responded.
But Howard, who said the correct guideline figure should be 121 to 151 months, said she also thought it would be a mistake to calculate a sentence for Ervin and Hoover simply based on the number of lightning links the case involved.
Selling Auto Key Cards “was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea. But I’m not convinced it reflects their true character,” she said. The judge said her sentence would meet a legal requirement to not make a sentence longer than necessary but would also be punishing enough to deter other people from trying the same thing.
“If five years in federal prison isn’t going to deter someone, I’m really challenged to believe that seven years or 10 years is,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Prison for Orange Park man, YouTube celeb who pushed machine gun devices
