This is outrageous. I’ve been wanting a hit piece like this written about me since forever, and have practically lobbied for one, but ATF’s chief counsel, Robert Leider, gets one for his all too sensible rule reform package. It’s all just staggeringly unfair.
I considered boycotting Everytown’s Smoking Gun anti-gun agitprop operation because of this affront, but I know they rely on me for a decent chunk of their traffic and I can’t just put people out of work like that, even if their entire job is to eliminate my gun rights (and yours, too).
I’m a bloodthirsty gun nut lawyer, not a monster after all. They start like this . . .
If you’ve read any of Leider’s pre-ATF scholarship, you’d know he’s a Second Amendment true believer, not some gun industry lapdog. The Smoking Gun naturally frames Leider’s rules reforms as “placating the gun industry” because that suits them more than the truth does. And the truth is that millions of Americans — Leider included — insist on their Second Amendment rights.
I did a full thread on that ProPublica article on the administration allegedly easing up on gun trafficking, so I won’t go into detail on it here. Suffice it to say, the ATF’s “zero tolerance” campaign was about harassing gun dealers for paperwork errors, not catching dealers who were intentionally breaking the law.
No, that’s not at all what he said in the interview. What he was explaining was that paperwork errors often arise from confusing or unneeded required information. So by simplifying the form, fewer errors will happen due to confusion and never become a problem in the first place. Intentional violations would still be punished.
By the logic of this idiotic article, we should make voter registration forms more confusing on purpose, and then prosecute those who make an honest error for voter fraud.
You could do this with literally any time frame. California has a ten-day waiting period. Someone could become prohibited on day nine and pick up their gun the next day. Is Smoking Gun really contending any significant number of prohibited people would be stopped by a 30-day window, but would have made it through a 60-day window? There’s no statistical backing for that contention.
Everytown asserts that the current form 4473 is a useful tool to catch prohibited people. You know, prohibited people like those who walk into a gun store and say, “Why yes, I’m a human trafficker, give me my gun now, please.” But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, these are the same dipshits who think criminals pay attention to “no guns” signs.
Note that we have already long been doing this form of sales for suppressors. And suppressors are almost never used in crimes.
By the end, we get to what Everytown is actually mad about: the continuing normalization and mainstreaming of firearms purchases.
The ATF’s changes would be a step back towards what the process had been for most of our history until the gun control interregnum of the last 60 years or so when authoritarian anti-gunners had the upper hand. They’re now losing the argument outside the minority of states they control and they’re big mad about it.
I guess they’ll just have to learn to live with that.
Kostas Moros is Director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation.