ATF's attack on gun dealers, owners claims real victims

AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

Recently, I’ve had a lot to write about with regard to the ATF.

While the bureau is never going to be the favorite alphabet agency of any gun owner, it didn’t use to be quite this bad. While they did some underhanded and shady stuff (see also: Randy Weaver), it wasn’t necessarily universal across the organization.

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However, recently, we’ve seen a lot out of the ATF that makes it hard to think that these days.

Well, if you’re hoping for good news, well, keep hoping.

From our friends at The Truth About Guns:

Master gunsmith James Morrison founded JM Gun Repair 46 years ago, after doing gun repairs in his garage.

The gun shop has been a local institution ever since, offering firearms, black powder and reloading gear, ammunition including hard-to-find calibers and James’ incredible skills as a master gunsmith with 50 years of experience.

The business is perfectly located, straddling the county line between Sarasota and Bradenton, Florida. “This has been a family legacy for 46 years,” said James’ grandson, Noah Morrison. His father and uncle work at the shop too.

Noah, who just turned 21, dreamed of becoming the third generation of Morrisons to operate this family business. However, his dreams were dashed when George Hancock, an ATF Industry Operations Investigator, known as an IOI, walked into the shop, at around the same time Joe Biden announced his war on “rogue” gun dealers.

“During the audit, he found faults in our paperwork,” Noah said. “In in the past, for these types of minor faults, an auditor would have just handed us a pen and told us to fix them.”

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The ATF inspector declared that these were willful violations and labeled them as rogue gun dealers, but the James family notes that they’ve never handed a gun over to anyone who was prohibited from receiving one.

What’s more, it doesn’t sound like there’s any evidence they did, and that’s important because the term “rogue gun dealer” actually has a definition, and none of them are simple paperwork errors. Falsifying them, sure, but that’s more than a clerical mistake and anyone with any sense knows that.

Now, taken as an individual instance, it’s easy to just chalk this up to an inspector with a broomstick up his posterior.

Yet when you look at what we’ve seen from the ATF of late, it’s impossible for me to give anyone there the benefit of the doubt.

The truth is that the ATF has essentially declared war on gun owners and gun stores. They’re doing everything they can not to simply enforce the law, but make it impossible to exercise our Second Amendment rights.

After all, if you sell enough guns, you’re going to make mistakes. There’s too much paperwork involved in a gun transfer for there not to be errors.

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So, given enough time, all gun stores will face the same potentiality the James’s have, that they’ll be labeled “rogue gun dealers” and shut down over simple paperwork errors.

That’s not right.

However, unless the executive or legislative branches step up, there’s little hope of anything changing, and the odds of that happening are about as good as Joe Biden suggesting a program of mailing an AR-15 to every non-felon adult in America.

It just ain’t gonna happen.

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