Posts Tagged bureaucrats

How Will Chevron Affect The ATF?

From Bearing Arms:

The Supreme Court’s decision to scrap the Chevron Doctrine doesn’t automatically mean that the ATF’s rules on unfinished frames and receivers, pistol stabilizing braces, and who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms will be thrown out by the federal judiciary, but it definitely makes it more difficult for the DOJ to defend the rules going forward. 

No longer can the agency reliy on judges giving the agency the benefit of the doubt when it come to interpreting supposedly ambiguous language. Unless the ATF is strictly adhering to the underlying statute when crafting its rules (which has not been the case in recent years) the odds are good that the rule will fall

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Feds Using Military Strategies To Target Americans

From The Epoch Times:

“This is how the military in Iraq organized for urban warfare to go in and clear houses,” she said. “This isn’t much different. I know what a setup looks like.”

Before the engagement even takes place, the FBI creates a “baseball card” on the suspects, which is a dossier developed for targeting terrorists.

“This is for kill or capture missions, so I want that to set in for a minute,” Stewart said. “The whole concept of a baseball card for overseas terrorism was based on creating a targeting package to go on kill or capture missions. This has now been transported back into the United States to go after American citizens.”

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GOA and Texas Sue Over Pistol Braces

From The Truth About Guns:

Attorney General Paxton, along with a coalition of other plaintiffs, is suing the Biden Administration over a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”) rule targeting pistol owners who use stabilizing braces. Attorney General Paxton is partnering with Gun Owners of America in this lawsuit.

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There Are More Armed Bureaucrats Than Marines

From The Federalist:

A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies,” found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests — more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. “One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted),” notes the report. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.”

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Former Agent Criticizes ATF

From Bearing Arms:

“We did not become ATF agents so we could collect data, ensure firearms are in compliance, seize trigger groups, argue about what a firearm is or is not, seize firearms for reasons other than prosecuting criminals or spend countless hours inputting data to justify someone else’s existence in HQ,” he wrote. “We became ATF agents so we could work the streets and smack evil in the mouth. We took this job because we are willing to risk it all and hope that we can make the streets just a little bit safer for the law-abiding, upstanding citizens of the USA.”

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US Government Ignores External Threats While Creating Fake Internal Threats

From Wired.com:

P4x says he was later contacted by the FBI but was never offered any real help to assess the damage from North Korea’s hacking or to protect himself in the future. Nor did he ever hear of any consequences for the hackers who targeted him, an open investigation into them, or even a formal recognition from a US agency that North Korea was responsible. It began to feel, as he put it, like “there’s really nobody on our side.” 

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ATF Wants To Double Its Size

From Ammoland:

AmmoLand News has learned from a leaked Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) video conference meeting that the agency is looking to double its size over the next five years.

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Bureaucrat Militias and the Threat To Freedom

From Law and Liberty:

In addition to the administrative agencies that we would expect to have militias, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, the Bureau of Prisons, and such, some unlikely federal bureaucracies actively train and use militias: IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Education, Consumer Safety Products Commission, Bureau of Land Management, Department of Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a host of other agencies, both large and small. Sensational stories about the Environmental Protection Agency raids to enforce the Clean Water Act have surfaced in recent weeks; the Education Department has used its militia to terrorize citizens suspected of defaulting on student loans; and a few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with the militia from the Fish and Wild Life Service made a spectacular raid on a Miami business suspected of having violated the Endangered Species Act.

These raids were full-scale military operations to enforce administrative agency regulations. Government militias have become so active in the past several years that the rate at which they purchase ammunition for training purposes has caused widespread shortages in civilian markets—at times it has been almost impossible for civilians to purchase the most popular calibers used by government militias. What should we make of this dramatic expansion of the administrative state?

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How The ATF Arbitrarily Creates Criminals

From FEE.org:

What if government agents could, by declaration, make you into a criminal? What if, without legislative change, bureaucrats could decide that what was legal yesterday is a felony today? What if we were governed not by law, but by arbitrary statements telling us what we may or may not do?

Unfortunately, those questions are not merely hypothetical—thanks to recent abuses of power by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), millions of American gun owners are facing them head-on. Even if you hate guns, you should be deeply concerned by the arbitrary power wielded by the ATF against your fellow Americans. If an unchecked executive agency can run roughshod over any of our rights with impunity, all of our rights are in danger.

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DEA Agent Gets Probation For Selling Guns To Drug Dealers

From Guns.com:

Joseph Gill, 42, was sentenced on Monday to five years probation with the first six months of the term spent in home detention after pleading guilty last October to two counts of illegally dealing firearms. While investigators determined he may have been sold as many as 100 guns in private transactions over the past several years, it was the sale of two AR-15s to members of a drug trafficking organization in 2016 that triggered his arrest.

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Bump Stocks Classified As Machine Guns

Everyone who has a bump stock has 90 days to turn them in or become a felon.

From Breitbart:

The Department of Justice is amending the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to clarify that bump-stock-type devices-meaning “bump fire” stocks, slide-fire devices, and devices with certain similar characteristics-are “machineguns” as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.

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