Josh Sugarmann’s increasingly irrelevant Violence Policy Center has issued a breathless press release announcing that after the org’s very diligent digging and lots of worn shoe leather, they’ve uncovered “hidden” gun manufacturers in the highly regulated state of Illinois. Can you even believe it?
Their complaint seems to be that people are getting FFL licenses as a way around the state’s onerous restrictions:
“The license. . .offers privileges not granted to private citizens buying a gun. These include the ability to bypass background checks and buy and sell firearms in interstate commerce via common carriers (including bulk purchases at wholesale prices).”
But aren’t these the same people who always say they want a permit to purchase scheme? An FFL license holder is pretty much someone who has gone through that. It’s like a super-duper background check. And it’s one in which — if the federal government wants — it can inspect you, too. Isn’t this basically their dream come true?
In reality, all this hysteria just reveals, once again, that anti-gunners really only care about things like background checks and permits insofar as they stop people from exercising their Second Amendment rights. If people manage to successfully navigate the onerous burdens erected by government — especially if they do so in an advantageous way — anti-gunners get enraged.
That reality explains a lot of their behavior such as . . .
1. Being angry that the ATF is processing NFA paperwork much faster in recent years, thanks to improved processing and digitization. They want them to stick to paper forms and continue to take a year or more to issue approvals.
2. Not enforcing California’s own laws on CCW permit issuance — like the 120-day processing time limit — when it doesn’t suit them.
3. Pushing forward with an ammo background check in California that wrongly denies over 10% of attempted purchases, denying many times more law-abiding people than actual prohibited people.
4. Not opposing excessive CCW fees even though they’d never stand for it if such fees were charged for voter registration.
And so it goes.
Kostas Moros is Director of Legal Research and Eduction for the Second Amendment Foundation. This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet he posted at X.
Kvetching over licensed and lawful FFLs. Demonstrating the real loophole is that guns exist at all.
Josh Sugarmann… one of the biggest liars and deceivers in the anti-gun sector.
ya know, I sort of kind of almost met him once.
My wife is a contract free lance journalist and researcher. She had this contract assignment that covered a city sponsored event, a few people from Moms’ Demand Action showed up. When I have the time I sometimes go along with my wife and her crew for their assignments, I went this time as we were planning to depart from there to a side trip visit to some of my wife’s relatives in Colorado. Its wasn’t an anti-gun event and wasn’t billed as a political event, it was suppose to be a a city sponsored ‘party like Christmas holiday’ thing for the public. But democrats and anti-gun can’t resist infecting everything they can so there was actually a prominent ‘give me money and vote for me’ presence for a democrat candidate and Moms’ Demand Action people set up a table for their messaging and started handing out their propaganda and the democrat politician propaganda. Josh Sugarmann and Shannon Watts both showed up briefly and were standing together at one point and one of my wife’s crew I was chatting with was standing right next to them. He said “Miss Watts’ to get her attention and when she turned towards him so did Sugarmann, but when the crew member bought the camera up they both turned away and walked away quickly and left the event. So that’s how I sort of kind of almost met Josh Sugarmann.
Mr Booger, so that’s how you get rid of them!
Just try to get a camera in focus on them.
(Sugarmann) …communications director for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (now known as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence).
They used to be more open about their intentions.
They are still open about their intentions, they just lie and reword more now trying to disguise their intentions not realizing its not working.
Half truths are still at least half lying.
VPC is complaining that private FFLs *aren’t* producing guns?
Illinois get busy!