President Joe Biden has never hidden his anti-Second Amendment feelings. Not really. He campaigned on it and he made promises.
And while some of his supporters are less than thrilled with the action he’s taken, it’s not like he hasn’t been trying.
However, it seems the president has been using the current upheaval we’re experiencing to hit gun stores hard.
While the world’s attention is focused on the horrific events unfolding in Eastern Europe, the Biden-Harris administration quietly unleashed hell on American gun dealers.
As the NRA first noted, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has started revoking licenses of gun dealers for the most minor paperwork errors – errors that never led to license revocations until Biden took office.
The move was intended to bolster Biden’s politically motivated strategem, which he first announced June 23, 2021, that “rogue” gun dealers are responsible for skyrocketing crime rates in large cities that historically have been controlled by Democrats. The “epidemic of gun violence” wasn’t caused by weak prosecutors who refuse to hold criminals accountable, or gangs or underfunded police departments or by any combination thereof, Biden claimed. It was all the fault of “rogue gun dealers.”
Back then, Biden said rogue dealers willfully transfer firearms to prohibited persons, fail to conduct background checks, falsify records and/or refuse to cooperate with an ATF tracing request or inspection.
This week, The Biden-Harris administration added four more criteria to the rogue list – all minor paperwork errors: failure to account for firearms, failure to document a gun buyer’s eligibility, failure to maintain records needed to comply with an ATF tracing request and failure to report multiple handgun sales.
None of those were worthy of revocation before, nor should they be now.
As noted, these folks are simply making minor paperwork errors. Failure to document a gun buyer’s eligibility isn’t the same as failing to make sure they’re eligible, after all. Failure to maintain records so the ATF can trace a gun could be something as simple as transposing a number or two.
These sound serious, but they’re not. They’re innocent mistakes that have long been seen by the ATF in law-abiding gun dealers’ paperwork. If these were indicative of graver issues, investigations would have followed and arrests made.
They didn’t.
But this is the ATF under Biden. Joe Biden doesn’t like gun stores. He doesn’t like people like you and me being able to go to a gun store to buy a firearm.
If he had his way, he’d shut them all down. Since he can’t, though, he’ll clearly just settle for shutting them down for whatever minor thing he can have the bureau manufacture.
See, the Second Amendment isn’t going anywhere. However, if he can make it more difficult for you or me to find a gun store to go to, well, that’s almost as good as gun control, isn’t it?
Never mind that these are small businesses being destroyed because of Biden’s jihad against gun ownership. Never mind that these are lives being upended because of a paperwork mistake. Nah, you don’t need to worry at all about any of that.
What matters is that Biden can deliver to his base something akin to what he promised.
Make no mistake, we’ll hear all about this in upcoming campaigns when he brags about shutting down “rogue” gun dealers. He did no such thing. He simply hammered some innocent schlubs who messed up some paperwork. That’s it.
But for the anti-gun portions of his base, that’ll be music to their ears.
The question for him is whether it will be enough to save him this time around.
