The ATF is rolling back rules. Most of them are going right back to where they were before the Biden administration, but you'd think we'd just handed every third-grader a gun to hear anti-gunners tell it.
Miles Taylor, who claims to have been the anonymous Deep State writer of a notorious op-ed, is one of them, and holy crap, are his claims ridiculous.
See, despite having worked in government long enough to become relatively highly placed, he also doesn't understand how policy is formed, because in a piece about the rule rollback, he starts with this "shocking" claim.
If you doubt that Donald Trump is in the pocket of gun lobbyists, consider this from his first administration: we couldn't release a report on protecting kids from school shootings without first clearing it with the NRA. This week, that fact got a lot more eye-popping.
Yes, that's in the original.
Now, let's consider that during Trump's first term, he said a lot of things that the NRA never approved of. He banned the bump stocks, leaving no grandfather clause like what the NRA was willing to accept. He advocated red flag laws, saying we should take the guns first, then worry about due process. And those are just the confirmed ones he made that I remember off the top of my head.
So if everything had to go through the NRA to rubber-stamp, then what happened in those two instances?
The truth of the matter is that it's not uncommon for reports to get screened by groups allied with the White House on certain issues. I'm sure Everytown was in deep discussions with the Biden administration prior to many of its activities. Getting the NRA to look at a report before making it public isn't exactly shocking.
The phrasing, though, is fascinating from someone like Taylor, who has a history of sensationalizing things. After all, he claimed there was a formal resistance to the Trump administration within relatively high levels of the government, and while it's easy to believe the rank-and-file bureaucrats were down with that idea, it's less likely that political appointees were involved. The Trump administration has dismissed such claims as outright lies.
Plus, since he lied about having written the op-ed in the first place, claiming he didn't, he's not above making stuff up.
He doesn't stop there, though.
Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) proposed a rule that would let gun dealers mail guns directly to people’s homes for the first time. This would replace the current system, where online-bought weapons must be routed through a licensed store for an in-person background check. It would be one of the most consequential changes to American gun policy in decades. Indeed, the ATF’s own projection is that nearly 3.3 million buyers a year would eventually order their firearms by mail, like a phone case or a pair of shoes.
And who stands to cash in?
Among others, the president’s eldest son. Donald Trump Jr. sits on the board of GrabAGun, an online retailer that bills itself as the “Amazon of guns,” and he holds a stake in the company. GrabAGun’s chief executive could hardly contain himself, telling investors the firm was “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.” The company insists Don Jr. had no hand in the rule, and the White House says it has no record of any conversation with him about it.
This isn't the first time we've heard this claim, but it falls apart if you actually read the rule.
You can only buy from a store in your home state, still have to complete all the paperwork just as you would in the store, and then it can be sent to you--again, in your state.
GrabAGun might bill itself as the Amazon of guns, but it's located in Texas. Unless they open storefronts in other states, they'll only be able to sell guns to residents of Texas.
Granted, Texas is a big state, and there's a lot of money to be made by serving the gun buyers of a state that size, but I can't buy one from there as a Georgia resident.
I'd like to say that Taylor just bought into the reporting on this, rather than is outright lying, but I can't. Not with his record of dishonesty. This is a man who took a position of trust, then claims he used that position of trust within the first Trump administration to undermine the president's agenda. Either he lied about undermining it, which means he can't be trusted, or he undermined the trust placed in him as he undermined that agenda.
In no case is this someone who should be accepted at face value, and so I have to believe that he knows he's lying here, but he's trusting that his readers are too stupid to know that.
