Curio-or-relic status is the one route in this chapter that opens a door rather than closing one, and § 478.118 opens it NOTWITHSTANDING any other provision of this part. A licensed importer may import all rifles and shotguns the Director has classified as curios or relics. Handguns get a narrower grant: only those classified as curios or relics AND determined to be generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes. The asymmetry is the thing to carry away — long guns qualify on classification alone; handguns must clear the sporting-purposes test on top of it.

What counts as a curio or relic is fixed by definition, not by taste. The firearm must be of special interest to collectors by reason of some quality OTHER than is associated with firearms intended for sporting use or as offensive or defensive weapons, and it must fall within one of three categories: manufactured at least 50 years before the current date, but not replicas of such firearms; certified by the curator of a municipal, state, or federal museum that exhibits firearms to be a curio or relic of museum interest; or deriving a substantial part of its monetary value from being novel, rare, or bizarre, or from association with a historical figure, period, or event. That last category carries its own proof standard — evidence of present value together with evidence that like firearms are not available except as collector’s items, or that like firearms in ordinary commercial channels are worth substantially less.

The grant does not suspend the rest of the chapter. Importation of curio or relic firearms must still be in accordance with the applicable importation provisions of this part — the permit and release machinery of §§ 10.1 through 10.3 — and with the importation provisions of 27 CFR part 447, a separate body of rules this book does not cover — the regulation requires compliance with it without saying here what it governs, so treat it as a question for ATF rather than one this chapter answers. And a curio or relic that also falls within the definition of a firearm under 26 U.S.C. 5845(a) must meet the importation provisions of 27 CFR part 479 as well. Those are the National Firearms Act categories Chapter 11 takes up; a machine gun’s age does not exempt it from the regime that governs machine guns.