How Anti-Gun Rhetoric, Media Bias Clouds ATF’s Rollback of Biden-Era Rules

The Biden administration used his executive power–he didn’t, mind you, because he was trying to remember what a sock was instead–to change the rules governing how the ATF operates. While the administration couldn’t change actual laws passed by Congress, the legislative branch of government long ago ceded at least some of its authority to the executive branch in the form of regulatory authority. So, the ATF changed some rules, and now they’re changing back.

That, of course, is good news for us. Not all of them are great, and not everyone is thrilled with what we’re getting, but for the most part, it’s a move in the right direction.

But the story itself is being manipulated and twisted by anti-gunners and their allies in the media.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.

Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.

“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”

Now, as it stands, this looks like he said/she said, which is fine. Both sides are getting a say, and if that were how the article left it, that would be mostly fine. How the Trump administration’s approach takes us back a century when the rules themselves are only a handful of years old in the first place kind of illustrates how hard it is to take Kris Brown seriously about literally anything, and the New York Times opted not to correct the record, but it’s not the worst sin I’ve seen the paper make on the issue of gun rights.

But they didn’t rest there. Oh no.

Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

Let’s understand that the zero-tolerance policy wasn’t about gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. It was about taking licenses away from dealers over minor paperwork discrepancies like abbreviations that aren’t approved, a miscalculation of what a three-day waiting period meant, and similar such matters.

Nothing has ever stopped the ATF from revoking licenses and arresting people who actually break the law. As a law enforcement agency, that’s been something they could do for quite some time. 

But the problem here is that the Times is simply parroting the anti-gun talking points made by groups like Brady. They’re taking the claims at face value, all without looking at what actually happened under the zero-tolerance policy in the first place. Sure, some bad actors got hammered, but a lot of people who were really just trying to run a lawful business got caught up in it, too, because of simple misunderstandings that, in the past, the ATF inspectors would just tell them to correct. 

The problem is that the media is already inclined to favor the anti-gun side of the debate as it is, because that’s where reporters’ sympathies lie. So when the anti-gunners spout something, it becomes gospel. Especially when anti-gun politicians say it, because I guess politicians are more trustworthy than anyone else or something? I honestly don’t get it. 

Still, this is what we’re dealing with. We can try and do what we can to counter it, but it’s the status quo here and now.

The media doesn’t report facts. It reports bias, and even if the reporter is trying, they’re often too ignorant of their own biases to even recognize what they’re doing. Since most of them aren’t even trying, though…

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