The ATF is rolling a lot of regulations back, putting an end to a dark era in American history regarding the Second Amendment, and it's no surprise that the usual suspects have their knickers' in a twist. Such is the way of the world, I'm afraid.
And, honestly, I don't mind so much. They're railing because it's what they do, but in the process, they're providing some real comedy gold. I mean, you can't hear the ridiculousness and not fall over laughing.
Take Leonard Greene from the NY Daily News, for example.
Make this make sense.
A guy with enough firepower to take out a small battalion storms an event, targeting the President of the United States, and the first thing the Justice Department does is enact a slew of changes that roll back laws regulating guns in America.
“Four days after the nation watched gunfire break out at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Trump administration’s answer is to gut commonsense gun safety laws and sabotage the only federal agency dedicated to keeping guns out of criminal hands,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, said in a statement last week.
The new Justice Department measures were signed shortly after Robert Cekada, a longtime law enforcement officer, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to lead the ATF, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws.
"A guy with enough firepower to take out a small battalion" is a hell of a generous take for a guy who had a 1911 and an shot gun. Hell, by that definition, I can take on an entire division by myself with my own modest collection. I know people who could take out a military the size of the United States' during World War II, but with armed with modern weapons, all because they've got the guns.
That's easily the most ridiculous description I've ever seen of this guy, who was armed with nothing particularly out of the ordinary, all of which was obtained in the anti-gun state of California, all of which complied with their laws, and all of which would escape even the most draconian gun control proposals currently being proposed anywhere in the United States.
See, what people like Greene don't seem to get is that the assassination attempt on Trump this time around involved weapons that are legal in all 50 states, would be legal in literally any version of this country that even tried to look like it respected the Second Amendment, and illustrated quite perfectly that the issue isn't the tools, but the tools using them.
If anything, this latest attempt is a validation of every move the ATF just made.
After all, those rules were in place for all three assassination attempts on President Trump, as well as the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They sure as hell didn't seem to do all that much to stop those, now did they? Of course not. They were never about that, nor were they about more pedestrial crime. They were about making things harder for you and me.
Criminals continued unabated. We saw crime continue to be a problem, with only the last couple of years seeing a massive drop. Interestingly, that corresponds to the Bruen decision upending the "may issue" permitting systems that anti-gun states adored.
We got an expansion of gun rights and saw violent crime drop.
Now, in the midst of the third assassination attempt, the Trump administration's ATF rolls back the rules that clearly didn't do anything, and people like Greene are acting like it can't make any sense at all.
"Make it make sense," Greene asks.
I don't have to make it do anything. It makes sense.
Some people are just too deep in their own Gun Derangement Syndrome to understand it, even if we used crayons and words of two syllables or fewer.
