Multistate Coalition Rises Against Biden ATF’s Attempt to Halt Private Firearm Sales Between Americans
Story by Warner Todd Huston, 5/6/24
As president, Joe Biden has tried every trick he can to limit or eliminate Second Amendment rights, but a coalition of state attorneys general is fighting back.
For well over a year, the Biden administration has been looking to criminalize millions of gun owners who sell their privately owned firearms to another private citizen, thereby redefining common, everyday gun owners as “gun dealers.”
Now, Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is attempting to implement Biden’s sneaky, backdoor attack on law-abiding gun owners.
According to an April 12 report from the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act made a subtle change in the definition of who can be considered a “gun dealer” by eliminating the language that once defined a “gun dealer” as someone who engages in repetitive sales of guns, ammunition or accessories with the “principal objective” of making a “livelihood or profit.”
The bill, which Biden signed into law on June 25, 2022, eliminates the “livelihood” portion of that definition, so that only the “profit” remains.
This means that if any gun owner sells a weapon to a friend, family member, or neighbor, he could be considered a “gun dealer” who could be forced to buy an expensive gun dealer license and could be jailed if he did not run an expensive and intrusive “universal background check” on the person to whom he sold his firearm.
On April 10, the Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, published the rule in the Federal Register. It will take effect May 20.
These rules would have a chilling effect on gun owners. If the ATF begins arresting, prosecuting, and jailing Americans for merely selling a gun to a friend, this would send a dangerous ripple effect throughout the country and represent a near-de facto ban on private gun transfers, the NRA-ILA notes.
These rules are also meant to cover the ATF as they perform “civil forfeiture actions by the government seeking to confiscate firearms, ammunition, and profits from gun sales,” the group warns.
But at least two major lawsuits have been filed by the states to stop this massive anti-gun power grab by the ATF and the Biden administration.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has filed one of them and has garnered the support of 21 other state AGs in defense of the Second Amendment.
“Biden’s latest attempt to strip away the Second Amendment rights of Americans through ATF regulations will make many law-abiding gun owners felons if they sell a firearm or two to family or friends,” Kobach said in a news release about the suit. “This rule is blatantly unconstitutional. We are suing to defend the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.”
Kobach warns that the rule will make millions of citizens into instant criminals.
The new ATF rule, Kobach’s press release explains, would require individuals to obtain a federal firearms dealer license for any sale the ATF thinks of as a profit, including currency, exchange of another firearm, or a gun smithing service.
“It could make a felon of a gun hobbyist who sells a firearm to another family member or of a hunter who trades a firearm with another hunting buddy,” the AG’s press release explained.
“Until now, those who repetitively purchased and sold firearms as a regular course of business had to become a licensee… This rule would put innocent firearm sales between law-abiding friends and family members within reach of federal regulation,” the court filing reads. “Such innocent sales between friends and family would constitute a felony if the seller did not in fact obtain a federal firearms license and perform a background check.”
Kobach’s lawsuit has been joined by the AGs from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Texas Attorney Genderal Ken Paxton has also launched a lawsuit against Biden’s out-of-control government and said in a news release that he is suing the federal government for “unlawfully attempting to abridge Americans’ constitutional right to privately buy and sell firearms.”
“The ATF’s regulatory restrictions go beyond the authority granted to the agency by Congress. The new Final Rule is arbitrary and capricious and is a flagrant violation of the Second Amendment. Attorney General Paxton is seeking immediate injunctive relief to stop the ATF from enforcing its unlawful edict while the issue is considered fully by the courts,” Paxton said in his news release.
Paxton adds that Biden’s redefinition of what constitutes a “gun dealer” would “subject hundreds of thousands of law-abiding gun owners to presumptions of criminal guilt” just for selling a single gun to a friend.
“Yet again, Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to rip up the Constitution and destroy our citizens’ Second Amendment rights,” Paxton said. “This is a dramatic escalation of his tyrannical abuse of authority. With today’s lawsuit, it is my great honor to defend our Constitutionally-protected freedoms from the out-of-control federal government.”
Utah, Mississippi, and 23 other states have joined Paxton’s lawsuit, the news release added.
These attorneys general, who represent more than half the states, are right. Biden and his ATF are using their power to make rules to eliminate the Second Amendment and criminalize millions of Americans for engaging in the right to keep and bear arms.
The ATF’s dangerous new rules are meant as a backdoor effort to squash our Second Amendment rights. And it is time this gun-grabbing despotism is challenged.