The ATF shouldn't be viewed as an adversary of the regular gun owner. If the agency focused on actual criminals, folks might not view them with some degree of hostility.
However, they cause a lot of problems, and not really for criminals. In fact, they have created an environment where the very people who would be their allies are terrified of them.
Over at The Reload, they ran a piece from Kevin D. Williamson where it goes into some length about varying aspects of the ATF and how things might change. However, one of the more interesting was when he spoke with a licensed gun dealer about some of the issues.
“There’s so much gray,” says J.D. “I want black and white.” J.D. is irritated enough by the ATF to talk to the press about it and worried enough to request anonymity. Guns are not his entire business, but they are about 40 percent of it, and the economy is not going gangbusters in his particular corner of these fruited plains. COVID lockdowns wiped out the business he owned before his current one, and gun sales are not great for him right now, either. If you want a leading economic indicator for life in rural or small-town America, ask a gun dealer how many new firearms he’s selling—or a pawnbroker how many used ones he is buying.
J.D. cannot afford uncertainty. It is a tax that takes food off his table.
“Take the braces—so much gray,” he tells me. “Is it legal? Is it not? If I receive a transfer from GunBroker [a popular online gun shop], do I need to yank that brace off there immediately? Once that started getting wrapped up in litigation, that’s where I was left as a dealer going ‘No! No! No!’ I don’t even want it in here, even though it may have been legally perfectly fine at the time. It was gray.”
Now, this is presented matter-of-factly, as a thing that simply is. That's the purpose of that piece, after all, and so it does an excellent job of what it is.
Yet I can't look at this and think about how the ambiguity creates what is most charitably thought of as second-order effects. Even if the back and forth on pistol braces was entirely good faith--something I'm not entirely willing to concede--the truth is that the back-and-forth rules made gun dealers jumpy.
Then we have the question of transfers. J.D. gets into some of the issues he runs into.
Another stymied part of J.D.’s business is transfers. As mentioned earlier in the series, you can buy a firearm online, but it will go to an FFL, who will put you through the background check and paperwork as though he were selling you the firearm himself—which, in effect, he is. Many small businesses such as J.D.’s supplement their incomes that way, and a few businesses are really just transfer agents, receiving shipments and running background checks, performing transfers for a fee with no inventory of their own.
But there are risks.
As also mentioned earlier, an FFL can get into trouble if he transfers a firearm that is perfectly legal in his state to a resident of another state in which the item is prohibited. A lot of dealers in places with transient populations—college towns, towns near military bases, etc.—make a lot of sales to people with out-of-state IDs, but it is a risk. J.D. won’t do it at all. If somebody shows up to pick up a transfer with an out-of-state ID, he gives them six months to become a resident of his state and pick up the firearm, after which he charges them “rent” on the item, in the form of a percentage of its value, until that rent reaches the firearm’s value, at which point J.D. sells it. There isn’t much he can do: He isn’t going to risk the out-of-state sale and generally can’t send it back to the original vendor under the terms of the sale. At any given time, his little shop is home to some amount of effectively unsellable inventory.
Understand that it's not necessarily the law that requires this, but J.D. However, he does so because the law doesn't accept "I didn't know what the law was in some state on the other side of the country" as a valid excuse. He could lose his livelihood over a simple error, and we've seen that way too often.
Williamson highlights the case of someone messing up the date calculation and selling a gun 31 days after the background check came back from NICS. You only have 30 days to do so, after which an entirely new background check is required. One big box store almost lost its FFL over it and Williamson speculates they only managed to hold onto it because they had the money for good lawyers and maybe a few pocket politicians.
This environment of fear, though, works for the ATF's benefit if you think of the agency as inherently anti-gun.
If people are afraid to go beyond the bare minimum, then things like gun transfers become more difficult. Out-of-state gun sales become more difficult. A lot of people decide it's just not worth it.
And it's hard for me to look at this and not think how that might be the goal.
Rather than them being second-order effects where it's the Law of Unintended Consequences rearing its ugly head, it's actually a desired byproduct.
Nothing we've seen from the ATF suggests that they really do support our right to keep and bear arms. Time and time again, they've regulated firearms in a way that's clearly beyond what federal law provides. It's hard not to think this was by design.
It's time for this to end, regardless of what entity is handling gun laws.
