Court Opinion

ID: 9491796
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:24:07.321371+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:56.999194
License: Public Domain

DENNIS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join fully in the court’s opinion, except for Part II.B.3.(“Applieation of § 2K2.1(b)(4)”), as to which I concur in the result for the following reasons.
Section 2K2.1(b)(4) provides:
(b) Specific Offense Characteristics
(4) If any firearm was stolen, or had an altered or obliterated serial number, increase by 2 levels.
I agree that § 2K2.1(b)(4) applies to the sentence of a defendant convicted of knowingly possessing a stolen firearm if the weapon was a “stolen firearm” at the time of the offense of conviction, regardless of who committed the theft, i.e., that it is irrelevant whether the illegal possessor was also the thief. In the absence of Application Note 12, however, I do not think the Guideline unambiguously expresses an intention that every defendant convicted of knowingly possessing a stolen firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(j) shall receive a 2 level increase in his offense level.
On the contrary, if it were not for Application Note 12, I would conclude that the Guideline itself should be read to mean that a defendant convicted of an offense involving a stolen firearm would receive a 2 level increase only if any firearm involved in the offense of conviction had an altered or obliterated serial number, and that a defendant convicted of an offense involving an altered or obliterated serial number would receive a like increase only if any firearm involved was stolen. (Of course, a defendant convicted of a crime to which the Guideline applies that does not by statutory definition involve a stolen or altered firearm, would also receive an increase by 2 levels under § 2K2.1(b)(4), if any firearm involved was stolen or had an altered or obliterated serial number.) In the absence of Application Note 12, this meaning would logically and reasonably follow because (1) the fact that a firearm is a stolen firearm is a not a specific, but a generic, offense characteristic when the offense of conviction is knowingly possessing a stolen firearm; therefore, with respect to this particular offense of conviction, that generic offense characteristic would be implicitly excluded from the category of “specific offense characteristics” — in other words the fact that the firearm was stolen would not aggravate, distinguish or qualify the offense of conviction in any respect; and (2) the base offense level already takes into account that the firearm was stolen.
Application Note 12, however, explicitly, carefully and thoroughly provides that in certain cases of'convictions involving stolen or altered firearms a defendant shall be spared from enhancement under § 2K2.1(b)(4) when his base offense is determined under § 2K2.1(a)(7). The extension of this mitigation only to cases in which the base level is determined under subsection (a)(7) clearly implies that it shall be withheld when the base level is determined under any other subsection; thus, two levels must be added if any firearm was stolen or had an altered serial number, unless the base level is determined under subsection (a)(7). This requirement is troublesome when the offense of conviction is possession of a stolen or altered firearm because the stated reason for the enhancement is an essential element of the basic offense, not an aggravating factor involved in the commission of the crime, and therefore provides no evident basis for increasing the punishment. However, a “commentary in the Guidelines Manual that interprets or explains a guideline is authoritative unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with, or a plainly erroneous reading of, that guideline.” Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36, 38, 113 S.Ct. 1913, 123 L.Ed.2d 598 (1993). Because I cannot say that any flaw in the rationale of the Guideline or its commentary reaches these proportions, I respectfully concur in the result.
I cannot agree with the majority’s argument that “the overall scheme of the Guidelines” and the machine gun hypothetical provide additional support for that result. *327Without Application Note 12, I believe the 2 level increase would not be required.