Being a licensed gun dealer sounds pretty cool on one hand. After all, you can actually have guns shipped to your house without an issue. The downside of having an FFL, though, is all the paperwork that has to be done and done perfectly, otherwise, you can run into trouble with the ATF.
In years past, the ATF seemed to get that mistakes happened. So long as it wasn’t particularly egregious, they’d have the dealer make the necessary correction and call it a day.
But then President Joe Biden took office.
Since then, he’s had his ATF declare jihad on law-abiding gun dealers. The result, dropping the hammer on them, penalizing them for simple clerical mistakes.
And we’re seeing the results now.
Gun dealers are crying foul as the Biden administration pursues an apparent crackdown on legal firearms sellers, whose licenses have been revoked at an unprecedented rate over the last two years.
“This policy is designed to be a backdoor violation of the Second Amendment,” Anthony Navarro, a Greeley, Colorado, dealer who lost his license last year, told the Wall Street Journal.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has taken away the licenses of 122 gun dealers since October — up from just 27 revocations in all of fiscal year 2021, a 350% increase in the first nine months of this fiscal year alone.
Dealers complain that many of the violations leading to the loss of their businesses amount to little more than paperwork errors.
Navarro, for example, said he informed the ATF immediately when he found that a lax employee had been mishandling buyers’ purchase documents — and lost his license as a result.
…
In a recently filed lawsuit, North Dakota gun store Bridge City Ordnance alleged that the ATF’s newly strict inspection policy is being “wielded as a political weapon.” “
That’s not wrong, either.
Look, Biden isn’t a fan of people owning guns. Sure, he might tell you that all you need is a shotgun, but he also told people to blast through the door without identifying your target. He’s probably not the best person to take tactical advice from.
Nor should you believe that he’s interested in even allowing you to have that shotgun.
The war on FFLs we’re seeing here is a simple concept, not unlike the attempts to restrict how gun companies market firearms. It’s all about trying to make it harder for law-abiding, responsible citizens to lawfully obtain a firearm.
Especially with the new rule passed within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which all but creates universal background checks.
The goal here is to create a situation where it’s harder and harder to buy a gun legally. Why try and pass restrictions over owning a gun when they can just make it virtually impossible to obtain a firearm in the first place?
Obviously, the gun control groups are applauding this turn of events. That’s not exactly a selling point for me, though.
If there’s an upside, it’s that the overall percentage of FFLs revoked is still relatively small, all things considered. The ATF acknowledges there are over 136,000 licensed gun dealers in the US. As such, we’re still looking at a fairly small percentage.
That’s not to excuse what we’re seeing. Many of these revocations are clearly things that never should have happened, and it really is just the beginning.
Right now, it’s 350 percent. What will that percentage be next year or the year after that?
The Biden administration has taken it upon itself to launch an assault on the Second Amendment using whatever tools it can find. Revoking FFLs is just one of those tools and we’re likely to see more of it as we keep going.
