By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Special to Liberty Park Press.
The Biden-Harris administration’s war on guns is the most comprehensive and multi-faceted gun control scheme ever created.
Former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, who has admitted meeting with gun control groups regularly at the White House, likely drafted most of the plan.
Under Rice, the administration nimbly exploits any anti-gun gain, while quickly pivoting away from pushback from the media, the public or Congress.
By design, most of their gun control agenda skirts any oversight – legislative or constitutional – and is immune from other normal checks and balances.
With their weaponized foot soldiers in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives willing to carry out any order regardless of its constitutionality, the Biden-Harris administration has become one of the biggest threats to the Second Amendment since the Bill of Rights was first written.
Because it is so vast and comprehensive, simply tracking all of the administration’s gun control initiatives has been difficult, which is why this reference guide was drafted.
What follows is a partial list of the Biden-Harris administration’s gun control agenda. It will be updated as needed.
Campaign promises
Joe Biden made no secret of his anti-gun agenda while campaigning for office. The “Biden Plan to End Our Gun Violence Epidemic,” is still on his campaign website.
As part of his goal to “get weapons of war off our streets,” Biden promised to “ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
He further promised to regulate “assault weapons” under the National Firearms Act, and to “buy back” existing “assault weapons” and standard-capacity magazines already in civilian hands.
In order to reduce “stockpiling of weapons,” Biden promised to support legislation that would ration firearm purchases to one per month.
In addition, Biden promised to end private sales by requiring background checks on all firearm purchases. Biden also said he would end several “loopholes,” most of which do not exist, as well as creating more prohibited persons by using a list of people from the Social Security Administration who are “unable to manage their affairs for mental reasons.”
Biden targeted online sales too, claiming he would “end the online sales of firearms and ammunition,” as well as prohibiting online sales of parts kits for homemade firearms.
Biden bribed the states by promising “financial incentives” for those who created “Red Flag” laws.
As you can see, the administration is already making significant strides toward fulfilling Biden’s campaign promises.
Weaponizing the ATF
None of the Biden-Harris administration’s gun control plans would be possible without an army of federal agents willing to carry out any order regardless of whether they’re legal, constitutional or even moral.
Enter the ATF.
The ATF has a long and sordid history of being more than willing to buddy-up to the occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, especially if they get something out of it. To that end, Biden did not disappoint.
This susceptibility to political pressure has led to massive failures by the agency. Some of those failures have cost hundreds of lives: Ruby Ridge, Waco and Fast and Furious to name a few.
Right out of the blocks, Biden gave the ATF a massive $1.7 billion raise, to “expand multi-jurisdictional gun trafficking strike forces with additional personnel, increase regulation of the firearms industry, enhance ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and modernize the National Tracing Center.”
This was the first hint of the administration’s plan to declare war on gun dealers.
Biden’s generosity did not stop with mere dollars. He needed a sycophant to run the ATF – someone he could count on to tighten the screws on gun rights – and there was no better screw-tightener than David Chipman.
Chipman was both an ATF careerist and a paid anti-gun activist working as a policy advisor for the Giffords. However, he was such a horrible candidate – which became obvious during his Senate confirmation hearings – that his confirmation stalled, fizzled and was eventually withdrawn.
Biden’s second choice to run the ATF was nearly as bad as his first. Once Chipman was shown the door, he chose Steve Dettelbach, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Ohio Attorney General in 2018. In this race he was endorsed by Biden, Barack Obama and Everytown for Gun Safety.
Biden and Dettelbach spoke the same language. When he ran for AG, Dettelbach campaigned on a platform that included “assault weapon” and standard-capacity magazine bans, universal background checks, “Red Flag” laws and much more.
Dettelbach was quickly confirmed, since it’s nearly impossible to reject two presidential nominees for the same position.
After receiving a massive infusion of cash and a new leader, the ATF was ready to repay the administration’s largesse, and they weren’t going to let pesky little things like the constitution get in their way.
ATF unleashed
What the Biden-Harris administration did to the ATF was create a federal police force that’s immune from control and oversight. In other words, they’re untouchable. They answer to no one but their director, who answers solely to the White House.
ATF Special Agents began barnstorming across the country, conducting unconstitutional “knock-and-talks” – warrantless home inspections, which the agency laughingly referred to as “voluntary conversations.”
Several of these intrusions were caught on tape, thankfully, which alerted the public to what was really going on.
To justify their surprise home inspections, ATF agents claimed they were looking for aftermarket triggers, solvent traps or proof that multiple gun purchases were legitimate and not straw purchases.
There was no accountability to the public – a common theme with most ATF operations – since the agency’s spokespersons refused to comment about their agents’ actions.
While the ATF’s armed special agents were busy pounding on doors, its unarmed Industry Operations Investigators, or IOIs, proved they too were more than willing to bend or break a few federal laws.
One Arizona gun dealer caught an IOI from ATF’s Phoenix Field Office creating an illegal gun registry with her cellphone in his gun shop.
“People ask me why I waited to July to go public about this,” the gun dealer said at the time. “The public needs to know that the crazy stuff the government is accused of doing, they’re actually doing.”
War on gun dealers
In June of last year, Joe Biden announced a new zero-tolerance policy for “rogue gun dealers,” who he claimed were responsible for skyrocketing violent crime rates in major cities historically controlled by Democrats.
The violence wasn’t caused by weak prosecutors who refused to hold criminals accountable, or gangs or underfunded police departments or by any combination thereof. It was all the fault of “rogue gun dealers,” who Biden claimed willfully transfer firearms to prohibited persons, don’t conduct background checks and/or refuse to cooperate with the ATF,
To vet Biden’s rogue gun dealer theory, which nearly everyone knew was somewhat crazy, the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project immediately sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the ATF, seeking the following:
Copies of documents that show the number of Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) and their state of residence, who have been prosecuted for willfully transferring a firearm to a prohibited person over the past three years (from June 23, 2018 to June 23, 2021.)
Copies of documents that show the number of Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) and their state of residence, who have been prosecuted for ignoring and/or refusing to cooperate with a tracing request from the BATFE, over the past three years (from June 23, 2018 to June 23, 2021.)
(Note: We did not seek the names or other identifiers of any FFL.)
As of today, after 14 months of waiting, the ATF has not responded to SAF’s FOIA request, which is federal law. In other words, the ATF – a supposed law enforcement agency – is willing to violate federal law to cover for Biden.
Unfortunately, after a few months, we didn’t need a FOIA response to see the toll the administration’s zero-tolerance policy was taking on the nation’s Federal Firearm Licensees, or FFLs.
Eleven months after Biden declared war on gun dealers, FFL revocations had increased by a staggering 500%.
What were once mere paperwork errors that could be fixed with an eraser were now intentional or “willful” errors, which were fixed with an FFL revocation.
Hundreds of gun dealers lost their livelihood – good, honest people just trying to make a living.
To be clear, none of these dealers transferred a firearm to a prohibited person, failed to conduct a background check, refused to cooperate with the ATF or committed any of the other sins Biden used to define “rogue gun dealers.”
Rule-making misuse
Unlike real law enforcement agencies, the ATF has the authority to write its own laws through its rule-making authority.
To be clear, the ATF can issue a rule or opinion and then change its mind, leaving the public scrambling to comply with the new law or face federal prosecution.
No example better illustrates ATF’s misuse of its rule-making authority than the pistol brace controversy.
As it stands right now, the agency is about to force millions of gun owners to register their pistol braces as short-barreled rifles, which will be regulated by the National Firearms Act. Those who do not comply could face up to 10 years in a federal prison.
Previously, the agency said pistol braces were fine – they did not to be regulated by the NFA – and millions of Americans purchased them. But now, after pressure from the White House, the ATF changed its mind and millions of American could be required to add their name to a federal firearm registry.
This is not the first time the ATF has issued conflicting new rules. The agency did the same about-face on aftermarket triggers.
Rare Breed triggers were initially approved for sale by the ATF, which now classifies them as a machinegun.
Owner Kevin Maxwell filed court documents back in August 2021 stating that the ATF made a mistake in its decision based on the definition of what constitutes a machine gun.
In his complaint, Maxwell acknowledged that the ATF has the authority to enforce federal code, in this case the NFA.
However, Maxwell stated, the ATF “has no authority to change the Code or the Code’s definition of what constitutes a ‘machinegun.’”
Four experts, all former ATF, concluded that Maxwell’s trigger system does not meet the legal definition of a machinegun.
War on homemade firearms
Americans have been making firearms in their homes since before there was a United States of America. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration wants this tradition to come to an end.
As a serial fabulist, Biden often repeats a host of discredited stories, but some of his most discredited lies appear whenever he talks about the Second Amendment – deer in Kevlar vests, fictitious prohibitions on the right to keep and bear arms, including cannons.
However, when Biden rails against homemade firearms, which he calls “ghost guns,” all of his furor is based upon a hoax created by the ATF.
“Last year alone, law enforcement reported approximately 20,000 suspected ghost guns to be – to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That’s a tenfold increase in these ghost guns from 2016. Tenfold in five years,” Biden said in April. “These guns are weapons of choice for many criminals. We’re going to do everything we can to deprive them of that choice and, when we find them, put them in jail for a long, long time. Law enforcement is sounding the alarms. Our communities are paying the price. And we’re acting.”
The entire “ghost gun” drama was started by Carlos A. Canino, the former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the ATF’s Los Angeles Field Division.
In 2020, anti-gun activists asked Canino about the prevalence of homemade firearms in California. An earlier study said 30% of the guns recovered by ATF in California were unserialized “ghost guns,” but Canino said the real numbers were actually much higher. “Forty-one percent, so almost half our cases we’re coming across are these ‘ghost guns,’” Canino said. That was all it took.
A story we published in April showed that not even the ATF could verify Canino’s claims, which became the basis for many of the administration’s “ghost gun” rants.
After the story was published, a staff member for a U.S. Congressman came forward. This whistleblower, who asked that their name be withheld from publication, revealed even more problems about the ATF’s “ghost gun” statistics.
The staff member asked the U.S. Justice Department for “ghost gun” data, since both the ATF and the Bureau of Justice Statistics fall under the DOJ’s purview.
“Because it is not currently a federal crime to own either a homemade firearm or a braced pistol, DOJ claims they do not have accurate/comprehensive databases to track their use in crimes. They compile information from state and local police units – but that information is only as good as what is reported,” the whistleblower said in an email.
To be clear, the United States Department of Justice told a U.S. Congressman’s staff member that their “ghost gun” data is neither accurate nor comprehensive, and then just days later, the President of the United States issued an executive order stripping Americans of the Second Amendment rights based upon this inaccurate data.
The administrations new “ghost gun” rule went into effect last month. One gun-rights group fears the rule has already created an illegal gun registry.
War on Blue states
While Biden lacks the votes in Congress to pass a national “assault weapon” ban, there’s nothing stopping him from pressuring friendly governors in Blue States to create their own bans.
After all, if more states pass restrictive anti-gun bills, it will be easier for the administration to push for similar legislation at the federal level.
The White House has contacted governors in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and Delaware.
Not surprisingly, the bills they have designed are similar in concept and some even use the same verbiage.
The “new” legislation usually includes 21+ age restrictions for firearm purchasers, implementation of “Red Flag” laws, and a ban on “assault weapon” and standard-capacity magazine bans.
Three such bills flew through Delaware’s General Assembly and were quickly signed into law by the state’s anti-gun governor.
The Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association immediately filed suit. One DSSA official said their members would be willing to “sell their houses” if needed, to pay for the litigation.
Takeaways
While this reference guide is by no means a comprehensive list of the administration’s entire gun control agenda, there is one thing that is not missing.
Nowhere in any of the Biden-Harris administration’s plans is there a single mention of how they intend to disarm criminals. Only law-abiding citizens are targeted for disarmament, not the bad guys.
That, friends, is all you need to know of their true intent.
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