ATF's director says the quiet part out loud
and refers to inalienable rights as a 'privilege'
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By Olivia Murray. Aug 20, 2023
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What a bizarre development in American politics that has seen the federal government cultivate and embrace a fiery disdain for the very ideals upon which itself was founded.
An item published at The Western Journal yesterday reported that the ATF is intensifying its war against the pro-gun portion of the body politic; from the article:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is escalating efforts to strip gun dealers of their federal firearms licenses.
The licenses, which enable businesses to sell firearms for profit, are being revoked in increasing numbers….
The ATF has yanked 122 federal firearms licenses, or FFL's [sic], from dealers this fiscal year alone.
That's up from 90 in all of fiscal year 2022, and merely 27 in fiscal year 2021.
In June of 2021, Department of Injustice's Merrick Garland announced a new "Gun Crime Prevention Strategy" which in part, focused on compliance inspections of FFL businesses. Some of the offenses which would result in "notice of [license] revocation" included:
- Refusal to allow an IOI [Industry Operations Investigator] to conduct an inspection
- Transferring a firearm to a prohibited person
- Failing to conduct a required background check
- Falsifying records
- Failing to respond to a trace request
Now aside from the fact that the ATF has absolutely no right to exist, I know enough about the bureau to know they have one of the worst reputations out of the more than 438 federal agencies, so it's reasonable to assume at least some of the "compliance" investigations weren't "lawful" — as loosely as you can use that term for an agency that's unlawfully operating. Just because the ATF calls their unreasonable searches and seizures a "request" or a compliance "inspection" doesn't make it so; I can only wonder if 122 firearms dealers last year told federal agents to take a hike until they came back with a warrant?
According to the Western Journal article, Joe Biden's ATF Director Steve Dettelbach said of the business owners with revoked licenses, "They're not going to have the privilege of being a gun dealer anymore."
Someone needs to remind Dettelbach, and every other aspiring despot in Biden's regime, that rights come from God, not government — the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, was written to affirm this reality, and this government, this brilliant and extraordinary new government conceived in liberty and born out of a rebellion to tyrants, would guarantee that it was not a benevolent authority doling out "privileges" at it saw fit, but rather a safeguard for inalienable rights that came from a moral Authority; nothing more, and nothing less.
Of course, the Founders emphasized that human beings have a right to self-defense, or to keep and bear arms as noted in the Second Amendment, and we have a right to autonomy and privacy, or the right to be secure in our persons, houses and effects, as noted in the Fourth Amendment.
Death by bureaucracy, or regulation, is the modus operandi of the gun-grabbers. They come after the brass mines with OSHA; they use the CDC to declare "gun violence" an epidemic; they buy out reloading supplies on the market for years to come via FDA and NIH government contracts; they choke out the points of sale with the ATF's "Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy."
Strangely, you rarely read news stories about the ATF targeting anybody other than the gun community; it was never really about alcohol or tobacco now was it?
