We’re less than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, and we’ve already seen the contempt he has for the Constitution. When his legal advisors warned him that his revised eviction moratorium wasn’t likely to withstand judicial scrutiny, his response was to try anyway; if the courts upheld the moratorium that would be great with him, but even if they struck it down it would buy his administration a few months (it turned out to be a couple of weeks) to keep the moratorium going while the case worked its way to SCOTUS.

Now Biden’s trying that same strategy with his new vaccine mandates for government workers and businesses that have more than 100 employees, and Second Amendment groups are starting to speak out about the president’s attempted power grab and how it could lead to an attack on our 2A rights.

“If Biden is allowed to impose regulations without a vote by Congress simply because he decides it helps ‘public safety,’ there is no limit to what he can do,” gun advocate John R. Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News. “He could use this same reasoning to impose any gun control regulation that he wanted.”

Alan Gottlieb, Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, also expressed concern over Biden’s announcement.

“I am very pro-vaccination,” Gottlieb told Fox News. “But Biden’s federal vaccination mandate reminds gun owners that if he could get away with it would use his executive power to mandate as many restrictions on Second Amendment rights as he could. He has already said that gun ownership is a ‘public health’ problem.”

A spokesperson for Gun Owners of America told Fox News that “whether the excuse is COVID-19 or some other pretext” the group will stand up for 2nd Amendment rights, and “nothing the Biden Administration has done so far indicates he has even the slightest love for American freedom.

“Biden isn’t concerned with ‘protecting those around you,’” the group said. “He wants your AR-15, your pistols, your ammunition, he wants it all.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition, self-described as a nonprofit grassroots advocacy organization founded on a philosophy of natural rights, is also concerned about the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.

“Joe Biden and his lawless administration do not respect or follow the Constitution, full stop,” the group told Fox News about the president’s announcement. “Biden and his officers have already made clear that they intend to unlawfully and unconstitutionally target law-abiding American gun owners with actions that put millions at risk of serious criminal liability.”

There’s no doubt that Biden is trying to stretch the limits of executive authority, and we’ve already seen his first attempts to do so with respect to our right to keep and bear arms through the proposed rules targeting home-built guns and pistols with stabilizing braces attached. And as we’ve previously discussed, the gun control lobby has also been laying out the strategy for Biden to use the regulatory power of the ATF to reclassify modern sporting rifles as machine guns by claiming that they’re “readily convertible” to full-auto firing.

David Chipman himself has been pushing this idea for several years now, and even though he won’t be heading up Biden’s ATF, he and other gun control lobbyists are still going to be pushing hard for the administration to target modern sporting rifles in the months ahead. Even if the Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s vaccine mandate as an abuse of executive authority, I suspect that the White House will still try to use its regulatory powers to go around Congress and impose a ban on millions of lawfully-owned firearms, though they might wait until after the 2022 midterms to do so.

Between now and then the DOJ and ATF will try to implement their proposed rules on home-built firearms and stabilizing braces, and Second Amendment groups will be readying their legal challenges so they can promptly challenge the regulations if and when they go into effect. If Joe Biden’s going to push the boundaries of his constitutional authority, he and his anti-gun allies should get ready for defenders of the Constitution to push back.