If you found that interesting, there's an excellent episode of This American Life called "The Arms Trader" which is another example of how messed up the law can be over the pond. The FBI (or another TLA agency) basically played both buyer and seller in a bogus arms deal, and managed to stitch up a bumbling old man for facilitating the transaction. It's almost comical how much handholding they needed to do with this guy to coax him into this situation, until you realise they then came down on him like a ton of bricks.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/292/t...