Like many Washingtonians, I have grown weary of marauding packs of dirtbags on dirt bikes and ATVs that terrorize drivers and pedestrians by speeding down the wrong side of streets and on sidewalks defying the police to chase them down. So it was with a slight frisson of Schadenfreude when I read that BIS today issued a Temporary Denial Order against X-TREME Motors, a dirt bike and ATV dealer in Utah. According to BIS, the TDO was based on a number of unlicensed exports of items requiring licenses, such as rifle scopes, which X-TREME misdescribed in export documents as ATV parts. It seems that the dirt bike and ATV business might have been a cover to smuggle controlled items from Utah to Russia and China, among other places

The dirt bike dealer, as you can still tell from its web site, had a side eBay business in which it sells a number of items that don’t seem particularly related to dirt bikes and ATVs, like rifle stocks, rifle scopes, ammo magazines and rifle barrels, and which will in many cases require export licenses. The BIS press release said that X-TREME was selling “crime control” equipment to China and Russia. It does not say what that equipment was, but I found two pairs of handcuffs for sale on X-TREME’s eBay site. After all, what fun is riding a dirt bike if you don’t have a few pairs of handcuffs along for the ride.

Between when I first looked at X-TREME’s eBay site and just now, someone has added at the top, in big red letters, this legend:

Hello we will not be offering any international shipping at this time. Please check back soon

Duh.  But “soon” might be a tad optimistic.

UPDATE:  As a commenter noted, and as I forgot when I wrote this post, riflescopes are also controlled for crime control reasons.

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