Everytown for Gun Safety likes to think of itself as the voice that matters in the gun debate. Oh, their anti-gun allies matter, too, I'm sure, but they like to act as if their take is the only one anyone should pay any attention to.
That's why they're very upset that the ATF has made a number of rule change proposals that run counter to the things they want. In fairness, I understand that. I was upset when most of these rules were enacted, after all, and since they weren't, it stands to reason that they'd be mad when they're about to be killed.
But I swear, if we could figure out a way to harness outrage and cope with electricity, we wouldn't need solar, wind, coal, hydroelectric, or even nuclear to power our entire society, and we'd be able to be as wasteful with electricity as we'd want.
And, just because I feel like it, I'm going to link to our friends over at The Truth About Guns as they talk about it, because it's funnier than giving Everytown the traffic.
When the ATF announced its 34-rule reform package on April 29, gun-rights advocates celebrated the largest rollback of regulatory overreach in a generation. The Everytown for Gun Safety crowd responded the way you’d expect: with public meltdown disguised as analysis, accusing the ATF of selling out to the firearms industry.
The most prominent Everytown response came from Greg Lickenbrock, writing for The Smoking Gun — Everytown’s in-house publication — in a piece cataloging the Bloomberg-funded outfit’s grievances with the reform package. Read carefully, the piece accidentally makes the gun-rights case better than most gun-rights advocates could.
Everytown thinks that regulators talking to the regulated industry is somehow scandalous
Lickenbrock’s central complaint is that Cekada signed the rule package surrounded by leaders from the American Suppressor Association, the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the National Association for Gun Rights, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Gun Owners of America. According to Everytown, this is evidence that “the rules are clearly designed to benefit the gun industry.”
A few problems with this framing. First, GOA, NRA, NAGR, and SAF aren’t the gun industry — they’re civil rights organizations representing gun owners. Gun-rights organizations and the firearms industry have historically had plenty of disagreements (anyone remember the Bill Ruger AR-15 magazine capacity comments, or the S&W “Lawsuit Locks” controversy?). Treating them as a monolithic “gun industry” interest reveals that Everytown either doesn’t understand the people they’re attacking or doesn’t care to distinguish.
It's the latter.
See, they can't make it like the people they disagree with are the problem, because that makes them look like the issue is just regular people with a difference of opinion, and that will come back to bite them in the butt. No one likes big, monolithic industries that are willing to destroy society in the name of profit, so they simply frame the "gun industry" as one of those.
Never mind that the gun industry isn't even in the top 50 industry sectors in the United States, being properly considered, at most, a mid-tier manufacturing sector of the economy. It's not the auto industry. If you exempt guns for the military, it's on par with the pet grooming industry and the manufacture and sale of musical instruments.
But let's not let that get in the way of talking about organizations made up of Second Amendment supporters as if they're astroturf organizations created by the big spending of billionaire donors who are dedicating every penny they made to overturning a constitutionally protected right. I mean, that would be crazy, right?
Then, of course, Lickenbrock had to engage in a little more fearmongering.
Lickenbrock claims one of the “most troubling” proposals would let FFLs ship guns directly to buyers’ doors without requiring an in-person visit to a brick-and-mortar location. He cites the ATF’s own estimate that 3.28 million gun buyers would use this option.
A few facts Lickenbrock doesn’t mention:
- Federal law already requires all gun transfers from FFLs to go through a background check, regardless of whether the transfer happens in-store or via shipping
- The ATF is expanding an existing regulation, not creating a new pathway around background checks
- Twenty-nine states already have concealed-carry permits that exempt holders from additional NICS checks because the background check happened when they obtained the permit
The “scary” 3.28 million figure is just a count of how many Americans the ATF estimates would find this option convenient. None of them would be bypassing the federal background check requirement. They’d just be skipping a trip to the gun store.
Yeah, this is...I guess they're unaware of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, either, which does ship guns to people's front doors and has for decades.
And yeah, you still have to get the NICS check.
What you have to remember, though, is that the relative inconvenience of forcing people to go to a gun store during operating hours isn't a bug in the system; it's a feature. They want to make it as inconvenient as humanly possible to buy a gun lawfully, which this proposal explicitly undermines. Then again, as TTAG's Scott Witner notes, Lickenbrock doesn't just misrepresent this, but he also claims the changes to the Form 4473 make straw buying easier, even though the changes to the form only add a requirement for someone to state their gender and an explanation of marijuana use in the section about using illegal drugs. That's it.
Plus, Witner tries to associate the expansion of the window for a NICS check's validity from 30 days to 60 with the so-called Charleston Loophole, which had absolutely nothing to do with an approved NICS check in the least.
In other words, Lickenbrock is either lying, a moron, or both.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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