The Obama Administration is preparing new gun regulations. This news is all the rage, but the article is short on details, so we don’t really know exactly what’s coming. In my opinion this action by the Administration is about two things. The first is revenge, because we dealt the them a high profile and embarrassing defeat after Sandy Hook. Two, it is about keeping the issue alive into the next Administration. I believe ATF will write new regulations that will be difficult for a future President to reverse without provoking a backlash from the media and gun control advocates (but I repeat myself).
I believe it will be about subtly expanding the pool of prohibited persons and broadening the definition of “adjudicated.” It’ll impose new regulations on FFLs about storage requirements, and reporting requirement. The question is whether it ends up being very audacious, going far beyond what the Gun Control Act allows. I think the smart move would be subtlety, but this Administration is rather unpredictable. If it’s bold regulation that greatly expands the power beyond what the Gun Control Act will allow, we’ll fight it in the courts and probably win.
What Obama should want is new regulations that looks quite reasonable on the surface, but screw us in subtle and not so subtle ways that are hard to explain to the average low-information voter. Regulations that we have to convince another President to re-examine under risk of a media frenzy. If the Administration doesn’t push us back as far as they can, we’ll be on a tear if there’s a Republican in the White House in 2016. Far better, they would think, that we spend all of our capital having to undo the mess the previous Administration made, rather than spending it to move forward.
Perhaps the reason the article is short on details is because that allows it to be longer on hyperbole.
I have no doubt that there is some sort of regulation in the works, and that we should be vigilant. However, for all the doom and gloom I’ve heard about what the Obama administration is going to do to our guns, vanishingly little has actually been attempted, much less come to fruition. I expect that after seven years of misfires, one might be a bit more conservative in their prognostications.
Congress is about to enter “budget season,” assuming the administration submits a proposed budget and Congress wants to pass one. There’s an opportunity there for Congress to severely curtail BATFE ambitions with budget cuts for the agency. Given the abject spinelessness of our current crop of Republicans that may be a fantasy, but it is something to keep in mind.
This president has done more to prop up “the gun industry” than anyone else. I salute him. Carry on…
i bet they use their Obamacare powers.
What is this: “place restrictions on high-powered pistols, among other things” ????
Your guess is as good as mine.
A story I read yesterday (some Yahoo article, I don’t have the link anymore) linked to what looked like the right .gov website for posting the text, etc. for proposed regulations, but it looks like all they have up right now is a placeholder. Basically, “We’re going to propose restrictions on high-powered pistols”, with no more detail than that. Either they’re still working on the text/details and this was leaked early, or they’re going to hold back as long as they can.
Go after AR-15 “pistols” maybe. That has a big potential to backfire for them, though, since that could open the can of worms that is the definition of a pistol to judicial scrutiny.
That is my guess too. How are they going to legally go after AR pistols though?
Make them AOWs.
That’s going big. I see that kind of thing getting slapped down during budget talks. I really hope they try it.
That could very easily backfire, though. The differences between AoW, handgun, and rifle are just about the platonic ideal of what light to be viewed as “void for vagueness.” For an AR pattern firearm, the lower is the “firearm,” after all. Walk in with a box of lowers and ask the ATF to tell you which one for in which category.
The elephant in this room is that GCA’34 was supposed to ban by punitive taxation anything smaller than the definition of a shotgun (18″ barrel, 26″ overall length). A clumsy hack allowed handguns an out, but in reality, even the existence of the broom handle Mauser make a mockery of the best categories.
Will the federal judiciary bite? Who knows.
Another potential angle for defeating the NFA, too! An Easter Egg…
In my opinion, there are too many AR pistols to make them NFA. Can you imagine how hard that would be???
This is entirely speculation on my part, but I bet he is going after importation of AK pistols etc.
Why does our side not go ahead and crush the little worm instead of waiting around to see what he wants to do?
Crush him how? He’s in office the next year and a half and can do what he wants.
Out his donors, go after their businesses and make them unwelcome among society. He takes orders from someone–find those someones and make them unable to do what they want to do, to raise the price unacceptably high for him to do anything anti gun. Get Congress to start going after the other things he holds dear, funding for his pet projects, constituencies, or again political donors. Stop holding back on the really damaging dirt, put it all out there in the open. Scorch the earth on him.
At this point, we’re playing defense, we have to react.
Send him a bill? National Reciprocity? Better to do that closer to the election.
We need to see what he’s proposing first. There are options once we know. We can get congress to cut off funding, but we have to know what to cut off funding to.
React with counteroffense, not mere defense.
As Sebastian said, we need to wait to see the proposals, first. All we have right now is rumor and innuendo.