ATF blows Biden claims out of the water

The BATFE (commonly called ATF) recently released an interesting report on gun dealers linked to crime.

I’ve mentioned before how Biden is pursuing the firearms industry and them evull gun dealers, right?

The ATF’s report found just 136 cases of illegal firearm trafficking tied to a federal firearms licensee (FFL) over a five year period. That’s just 1.6 percent of all 9,700 cases. To put that into more specific perspective, there were 134,516 federal firearms licensees (FFLs) at the end of 2021. That equates to just 0.1 percent of all FFLs being implicated in allegedly illegal firearm trafficking before President Joe Biden instituted his whole-of-government crackdown on the firearm industry.

.1% .001 of the licensees. I know for a fact there are more Senators and Congressmen under investigation – Corey Bush alone is worth more than that. (Quick update, recent data from her campaign reports that her husband has made $123,000 of taxpayer funds as her “security head”since January 2022 and is still getting payments.) But back to the ATF report:

Conversely, illegal straw purchases and private sales accounted for 80 percent of all cases. Stolen firearms represented another 25 percent of cases of illegally-trafficked firearms.

“The data analyzed in this report indicates that a shift in the types of trafficking channels used over the course of the last two decades has occurred,” the report summary states. “Corrupt FFL investigations represented almost 9% of trafficking investigations in the 2000 report, but now represent less than two percent of trafficking investigations.”

The ATF’s “zero-tolerance” policy resulted in 157 federal firearms licenses revoked in 2023 following an inspection. That was up from 88 licenses revoked in 2022 and five in the last six months of 2021. Reports show that 165 FFLs were able to maintain their licenses following a revocation hearing in 2023. That was up from 83 in 2022 and just one in the last six months of 2021. Another 88 FFLs voluntarily surrendered their licenses in 2023, rather than endure the costly and painstaking process of clearing a business’s name due to what are many times minor clerical errors. That was up from 69 in 2022 and 24 in the last six months of 2021.

What’s more, ATF has “named-and-shamed” businesses that saw their licenses revoked or that ceased operations. That’s an overtly political maneuver to satisfy gun control advocates who clamor to falsely smear business owners as “bad apples” when many times it is clerical errors in records that caused them to run afoul of inspections.

One would think a better use of agents’ time would be to look at who actually facilitates many of these illegal guns’ movements.  (For some reason, the words “Fast and the Furious” keep going through my mind… and no, I don’t mean the movie series.)

The ATF’s own data shows that the firearm industry isn’t the source of “crime guns.” The source is criminals – as NSSF has said all along. Falsely blaming the firearm industry for a lack of willingness to address crime puts our communities at risk and squanders the trust Americans place in ATF to execute their mission without political favor. NSSF

Yes, I am aware the NSSF is as unbiased as the NRA. But the report comes from BATFE.

Another quick item to watch – though Mexico knows that PLCAA forbids suing gun manufacturers over illegal use of their guns by criminals ‘way downstream of the industry supply chain, they are suing multiple makers saying “US governments are forbidden to, but since we are not a US entity we are not.” (I suspect this a cartel backed suit since they have well established supply chains for illegal guns.) It is at the Supreme Court as we speak.

Category: Guns