The Bill of Rights protects speech, religion, the press, assembly, due process, privacy, and the right to keep and bear arms. Only one of those rights has an entire federal agency built around regulating, restricting, investigating, and prosecuting the tools necessary to exercise it. The Second Amendment. That agency is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
There is no federal Bureau of Speech. No federal Bureau of Religion. No federal Bureau of Press and Assembly. No federal agency licenses newspapers before they publish, inspects churches for recordkeeping violations, registers printing presses, or forces Americans to pay a tax before exercising a First Amendment right.
But when it comes to the Second Amendment, Washington has built exactly that kind of bureaucracy.
Federal agencies have abused power against other constitutional rights, too. The FBI and DOJ have targeted speech, political activity, and religious Americans. The NSA has raised Fourth Amendment concerns through surveillance. DHS and TSA have expanded federal search power in the name of security. The IRS has been accused of politically selective enforcement.
Those abuses are real. But they are not the same as having an entire agency whose…mission is aimed directly at the people, businesses, products, paperwork, and transactions tied to one constitutional right.
— Texas Gun Rights in No Other Constitutional Right Is Policed Like the Second Amendment