Occasionally, I talk to someone about the National Firearms Act registration process, with all of its hassles, and their response is “why not just skip the rigmarole?” The short answer, of course, is that staying legal, even when the laws you are obeying are stupid and unjust, has it benefits. As a firearms enthusiast, I don’t want to become a prohibited person and lose my legal right to possess firearms. I want to keep as much of my liberty as I can.

Since his initial arrest last October, a home silencer hobbyist in Weston, Wisconsin has learned this lesson the hard way. From the Wausau Daily Herald:

A Weston man who posted a Facebook video of himself using a homemade silencer on a rifle was ordered Wednesday to serve three years of federal probation and fined $1,000.

Jason M. Trempe was arrested by federal authorities after they were alerted to the video and found the silencer and legal firearms in his home during a search in October 2012.

Both Trempe’s attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Jarosz agreed that Trempe, 30, didn’t build the silencer with evil motives in mind. Instead, Trempe was driven by an inherent curiosity about mechanical devices and a fascination with guns to make “a not very good” silencer for a rifle, Jarosz said.