{"id":109176,"date":"2025-04-11T23:20:13","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T04:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=109176"},"modified":"2025-04-11T23:20:22","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T04:20:22","slug":"109176","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=109176","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Latest Moves to Reign In ATF Overreach are Welcome Blows Against the Anti-Gun Bureaucracy.<\/a><\/p>\n

There really isn\u2019t any line that anti-gun politicians won\u2019t cross in order to undermine the Second Amendment. None. I remember several years ago when I was working for U.S. Senator Bill Roth (R-DE) \u2013 yeah, the Roth in Roth IRA \u2013 in his Wilmington office. There was a proposal to tax ammunition. This wasn\u2019t the 11% excise tax we\u2019re all familiar with, already pay, and never really see.<\/p>\n

No, this was a tax designed to punish gun owners, to hurt them \u2014 significantly \u2014 right in their wallets. A couple of variations of this kind of tax were being considered or floated. If I remember correctly, the one at the time was either a 25% tax on handgun ammunition, or even a $0.25\u00a0per round<\/em>\u00a0tax.<\/p>\n

I asked the Senator his opinion on an ammunition tax and his reply was quintessential Bill Roth. He looked at me and said, \u201cIt\u2019s a tax. I\u2019m against taxes.\u201d He wasn\u2019t concerned about the tax as an attack on the Second Amendment. He saw it as yet another attack on taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Taxation is the primary weapon for politicians looking to take something away from citizens. The problem for them, however, is that new tax bills are harder and harder to pass as the majority of taxpayers are kind of tired of paying more and receiving little to nothing in return.<\/p>\n

Knowing this, the Biden Administration sought to press its anti-gun agenda, in part, through overly aggressive enforcement by the federal firearm regulatory bureaucracy. By taking a zero tolerance approach to even the smallest clerical mistakes made by gun dealers, the Biden Administration would use ATF to strip retailers of their licenses to sell guns.<\/p>\n

While this was pitched to the media and the public as zero tolerance, what they really should have called it was zero chance, as in there was virtually zero chance the agency wouldn\u2019t be\u00a0taking your FFL<\/a>, because they were determined to find something. And that\u2019s exactly how many retailers viewed it.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, not every ATF agent doing FFL inspections was hellbent on pulling licenses and was willing to see simple clerical errors for what they were, unintentional minor mistakes that are easily rectified. In other words, they made a \u2018no harm, no foul\u2019 call.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, though, there were ATF agents who were more than willing to be\u00a0weaponized<\/a>\u00a0by the agency\u2019s leadership against FFLs lawfully conducting business. Maybe they saw this as a pathway to promotion within an administration that placed a lot of value on blindly following orders from the\u00a0Autopen-in-Chief<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Monday news came that\u00a0the era of zero-tolerance was over<\/a>. The National Shooting Sports Foundation heralded the announcement from the Trump Administration in Monday\u2019s edition of\u00a0Bullet Points<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

NSSF praises the announcement today by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that the agencies are doing away with the Biden-era \u201czero-tolerance\u201d policy that punished lawful and highly-regulated Federal Firearm Licensees (FFLs) for minor clerical errors.<\/em><\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s announcement also noted that the Biden-era regulatory policies on \u201cengaged in the business<\/a>\u201d and\u00a0pistol stabilizing braces<\/a>\u00a0would be reconsidered. Both of which were viewed \u2013 rightly \u2013 as regulatory overreach by the agency on issues that should have been addressed legislatively by Congress.<\/p>\n

Where exactly we go from here is hard to predict, but Monday\u2019s announcement is a very good sign that government of the people, by the people, for the people hasn\u2019t succumbed to the Biden-era alternative of government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.<\/p>\n

For right now it\u2019s good riddance to some pernicious antigun regulatory overreach. We all know, however, that bureaucrats are going to bureaucrat because that\u2019s the only thing they know how to do. And their turn will no doubt come again. Here\u2019s hoping\u00a0Revenge of the Bureaucrats<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t hit theaters anytime soon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Latest Moves to Reign In ATF Overreach are Welcome Blows Against the Anti-Gun Bureaucracy. There really isn\u2019t any line that anti-gun politicians won\u2019t cross in order to undermine the Second Amendment. None. I remember several years ago when I was working for U.S. Senator Bill Roth (R-DE) \u2013 yeah, the Roth in Roth IRA \u2013 … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,15,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucraps","category-business","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109177,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109176\/revisions\/109177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}