We’ve already talked with Dimitrios Karras, owner of Ares Armor, but it’s always good to hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth. In this interview with Reason TV, Dimitrios calmly and clearly discusses exactly what happened with the ATF raid, and exactly how dumb the ATF’s actions were. “To think that this is over a piece of plastic is ludicrous,” Dimitri says, “this was a nice way for them to get their arm inside of our business and grab the information that they’re actually looking for.” There is a new piece of information that we didn’t have before, though, and it makes the ATF look even more like a bunch of jack-booted thugs . . .
“I had literally had a meeting with two of the ATF agents,” Dimitri says, “after we had had the temporary restraining order granted to us. I took them into the building where the polymer lowers were being housed, where we had separated them from the rest of our inventory and we placed them in a separate room under lock and key. I offered to hand the key to this room — the only keys in existence to this room — to the ATF agents that were there so that they would be 100% assured that we did want this handled in the court system and we weren’t trying to pull anything underhanded and weren’t trying to divest ourselves of the product or do anything like that. There was also a camera pointed directly at this door, and I offered the ATF if they’d like to have access so that they can view this camera remotely. They turned me down on that as well.”
It sounds like Dimitri and Ares Armor went above and beyond to try and accommodate the ATF, proving that they weren’t going to dump the lowers and the records while the legality of the lowers were being hammered out in court. Instead, the ATF decided to break down the shop’s doors and take everything by force.
“The only difference in this case is we said ‘no’ and we stood up.” That’s why Dimitri says the ATF is trying their hardest to ruin their business. The ATF could have had the full cooperation of Ares Armor if they had just asked nicely and worked through the court system. But instead they wanted to point loaded firearms at law abiding citizens, using lethal force over a paperwork issue. People could have been killed, and all because of a misunderstanding about a manufacturing process that the ATF could have cleared up with a simple visit to the workshop and reading some records.