While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives may have been Joe Biden's primary vehicle for attacking our Second Amendment rights during his term as president, it wasn't the only agency tasked with carrying water for the gun control lobby.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation's senior vice president and general counsel Larry Keane is now asking another one of those agencies to look within and expose the Biden administration's anti-gun activities. In a letter to Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson obtained by Bearing Arms, Keane requests the agency take a number of steps to bring it in line with President Donald Trump's executive order on protecting the Second Amendment.
• Issue a statement publicly reaffirming the Commission’s commitment to protecting Second Amendment rights, consistent with the Executive Order;
• Review actions during the last administration to determine the full nature and extent of the pressure exerted by the Biden White House on former commissioners and staff to infringe Second Amendment rights;
• Review actions during the last administration by former commissioners and staff to determine whether they improperly aligned themselves with anti-Second Amendment NGOs, utilized Commission resources to aid those groups, or otherwise engaged in conduct that infringed the Second Amendment;
• Refer any relevant findings to the Attorney General; and
• Promote full public transparency of the foregoing by making public the results of the Commission’s inquiry.
This isn't just a fishing expedition. As Keane points out in his letter, Biden enlisted the FTC in his whole-of-government attack on the Second Amendment and the firearms industry by pressuring the agency to “issue a public report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and how such manufacturers market firearms to civilians, including through the use of military imagery.”
Biden was simply parroting the gun control lobby when he made that demand. Groups like Brady and Giffords filed FTC complaints allegeing that gunmakers are marketing to kids by, among other things, making firearms that are appropriate and suitable for youth shooting sports. Sandy Hook Promise, for instance, seems to take issue with youth shooting sports in general, as well as specific publications like Junior Shooters, which it complains "is a magazine and website marketed to kids as young as 8 years old, with 'articles for juniors by juniors.'”
The NGOs’ “complaints” traffick in unsupported speculation, inuendo, and misrepresentations. Echoing a theme of President Biden’s Executive Order, they rely heavily on a false equivalence between firearms advertising and cigarette advertising.
While there is no legitimate purpose for a minor using cigarettes (and most states prohibit minors from possessing or using them), there are legitimate reasons for minors, properly supervised by adults, to use firearms. The NGOs criticize ads depicting children lawfully learning firearm safety and enjoying the shooting sports under adult supervision, but they fail to identify any evidence whatsoever that such ads ever caused any minor to use a firearm improperly.
Keane says the most "dramatic" example of the gun control lobby's claims agains the industry was "the assertion that advertising firearms as useful for self-defense is unfair and deceptive."
As an initial matter, the NGOs’ description of firearm industry advertising as “guns as a safe means of protection” is highly misleading. NSSF members do not claim that firearms are not dangerous. On the contrary, they include prominent safety warnings in their user manuals, which encourage owners to seek training before using their products, precisely because firearms can be dangerous. Indeed, that is the fundamental reason that firearms are useful for self-defense and the exercise of Second Amendment rights. If firearms were not capable of being dangerous, they would be as useless as a match that cannot burn or a saw that cannot cut.
In countless cases, Americans have used firearms because they were the tool uniquely capable of helping them save their lives or the lives of their family members. The NGOs seek to take that right away because they have an infantilizing view of American citizens. They argue that it is the role of the FTC to deprive individuals of the right to protect themselves with firearms because those dangerous tools might hurt them.
Keane maintains the Federal Trade Commission should look into the activities the agency conducted during the Biden administration as part of President Trump's executive order for the AttorneyGeneral to conduct a review of the Executive Branch to identify infringements of Second Amendment rights. While Trump didn't directly mention the FTC in his order, it's pretty clear that the agency was part and parcel of Joe Biden's executive branch anti-gun actions, and it's a more than reasonable request for NSSF to make.
