The Department of Justice has done a lot more for gun rights than any other DOJ in my lifetime. That's despite the concerns many of us expressed over Pam Bondi being named as Attorney General.
But the DOJ is far from perfect, and a recent decision by them is a big problem, as one gun rights group pointed out in an email.
It seems that Texas Gun Rights sent a fundraising email out, which started with this:
In a stunning betrayal of gun owners, Attorney General Pam Bondi recently ordered the Department of Justice to continue defending Joe Biden’s “Engaged in the Business” rule — a backdoor gun registration scheme.
And now there’s a new twist: a federal judge in the Northern District of Alabama just ruled that the ATF overstepped its authority with major parts of this rule, and issued a permanent injunction protecting the named plaintiffs and their members from enforcement.
Despite this rebuke, Bondi’s DOJ is pressing forward with defending the rule — even after President Trump ordered a full review of Biden’s gun control agenda earlier this year.
This is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to kneecap Trump’s pro-gun agenda.
Now, they're saying it's a backdoor gun registration scheme. That's a bold claim, and it was forwarded to me to judge if this was accurate or not.
And, well, it is.
Allow me to explain.
You see, I don't necessarily think Bondi is backing it because of that. I honestly don't know why she's defending it this way, but I do think the end result is gun registration, all without expressly doing anything to formally create a gun registration scheme.
It starts with something more directly related to what is likely to happen under the Biden-era rule of who is "engaged in the business" of dealing firearms. While it had been someone who sought to derive part or all of their income from the buying and selling of firearms, the Biden administration got something they wanted, which was making it so anyone who makes a profit selling a gun counts as a dealer.
Since a lot of people aren't sure what exactly that means--and one interpretation could hypothetically be if you sell it above the depreciated value of the gun--they instead simply go through licensed dealers. It's an unmanageable mess, and too few people are really going to be able to devote the time to study where they stand. They'll just do what will keep them out of trouble.
This means that almost every lawful gun sale will generate a Form 4473.
I've long argued that these are a de facto kind of gun registration. The only thing that keeps them from really being one is that face-to-face transfers are still legal, which allows people to get outside of that scheme.
With this rule, which Bondi is backing fully, though she's not required to, it will create still more 4473s.
Then we have the terrifying part.
The average small business lasts less than five years. Most gun stores are small businesses. That means most go out of business within that timeframe. When those who fail do, they're required to send their 4473s to the ATF.
The ATF is, rather controversially, digitizing all of those. They're creating a database that will include millions of firearm transactions. When those transactions are increased out of concern over breaking the law, it will create a backdoor gun registry.
It won't be a terribly efficient one, thankfully, and there will still be those who don't figure they're breaking the law by selling a gun since they don't figure they're seeking a profit, so it won't jam up everyone, but it may still create enough of a problem that we're going to get something that Congress expressly forbid.
So yeah, Texas Gun Rights actually has a point. They're absolutely correct about the end result, if they get a bit hyperbolic in their description of what's happening. It's a fundraising effort, so that's to be expected.
But unlike some fundraising efforts, particularly by the left, they're not lying about anything.
It's a novel approach. I'd say gun control groups should try it, but if they did that, they'd never raise another dime.
