For decades, anti-gunners had the ear of whoever was running the ATF at any given moment. They had all the phone numbers back and forth, and while anti-gun groups might not have liked everything the ATF did, they liked most of it.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and everything simply has to be as nefarious as possible, at least according to Everytown's so-called publication, The Smoking Gun.
I call it "so-called" mostly because it's presented as a news site when it's nothing but an anti-gun version of what we do. We're just honest about it. At the site, though, they're very upset because the ATF's new rules might actually benefit the gun industry.
When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unveiled several proposed and final rules this April, the agency framed them as an effort to modernize gun regulations and reduce burdens on the gun industry. If implemented, however, many of the rule changes would have a disastrous effect on public safety by creating new gun trafficking channels and putting guns into the hands of more people prohibited from owning them.
As discussed below, a closer look at the rules shows that many are designed to not only save the gun industry millions in regulatory requirements, including at least $12 million in compliance and administrative costs, but also open up potentially billions in new revenue streams — in addition to the $380 million in the ATF’s own estimates. Taken together, the ATF rollbacks represent a significant handout to the gun industry.
Of course, there was no blinking by these guys when Biden created a federal jobs program for well-placed anti-gunners called the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
And let's be clear, this is not entirely wrong. The regulatory costs are legit, and there is a possibility of increased revenue through some of these measures. I think, however, this is being oversold.
Pun fully intended.
One of the largest direct industry benefits identified in the ATF’s analyses comes from its final rule revising the federal regulatory definition of “machinegun” following the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill. The court held that the agency had exceeded its authority in classifying bump stocks as machine guns in 2018 in response to the Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas, which involved over a dozen AR-15s equipped with the devices.
According to the rule, the ATF estimates that allowing the gun industry to return to selling bump stocks — as Slide Fire Solutions did months after the Supreme Court ruling — will bring in approximately $204.9 million in revenue over 10 years. Yet the rule offers no analysis on the potential impact on public safety, a critical flaw identified in several of the ATF proposals.
The ATF estimates that another proposal to ease import restrictions on training ammunition would not only save importers $45,215 over 10 years in terms of paperwork, but also generate $174.6 million in revenue due to “increase[d] retail sales.” If the rule is finalized, the ATF predicts consumers “would see lower prices” on training ammunition, and importers “would see higher profits.”
The funny thing is that a lot of people didn't care about bump stocks until the ATF banned them. I still don't care about them, but mostly because forced-reset triggers are much cooler.
Still, you can see what a lot of this is going to actually be like. They take potentially increased profits from over a decade, lump them together, and act like this is a massive windfall for the gun industry, thus painting these moves in some kind of nefarious light.
Why? Because the gun industry is evil and anything that benefits them is evil.
Never mind that they don't blink about gun storage mandates being a windfall for the gun safe producers. That doesn't matter to them. They don't ever note that gun control might be good for the less-lethal weapon industry, either.
See, every move by the government creates winners and losers. For decades, though, the losers were the gun industry, which was just too stubborn to take the hint, thankfully.
Now we have an ATF that seems to be acting in a manner that doesn't feel like they exist just to crush gun rights, and Everytown just can't handle that. The problem for them is that they and their buddies have been in the driver's seat for so long that they don't know what to do when they don't have any say at all.
I just find it funny.
