Announcing that your administration is now going to enforce the laws already enacted are not changes, and not worthy of a press conference.
And yet Paul Ryan and the NRA are having hissy fits about…what, exactly? If there are no changes, what are they panicking about, and what is it they are trying to repeal?
That was my opinion too.
So do you feel that Paul Ryan and the NRA are overreacting to the President’s proposals?
I don’t know what they are saying. I listened to the POTUS give his speech from a doctor’s waiting room and haven’t given the matter any further consideration.
I see the extending of FFL requirements to be the point most open to court challenge.
Of course any President can ask Congress to fund something, pass a certain law, and make decisions on how executive departments will spend their budgets (within certain limits) and so on. That is how the law making process is supposed to work - for the legislature to make decisions about law making, even if the decisions are not those wanted by the President.
However the Senate previously took up the matter of tightening the FFL requirements ( the so called gun show loophole) and rejected the proposal. Taking unilateral executive action contrary to expressed legislative intent is not how the process should work and might be unconstitutional law making on the part of the President.
Further, redefining “being in the business” of selling a certain product to include persons who sell one of said product in a private sale may set a bad precedent. Should every person seeking to sell his personally owned used car be required to obtain a car dealer license? To attack the gun show loophole the Congress could chose to set a certain limit, $X worth or Y or more firearms sales per year mean you must get a license, that would better reflect reality. Then the executive can sign such a law and begin to enforce it.
That’s sort of where I’m at on it. I agree these are changes in the right direction but even if they are followed very strictly I doubt it will have much of an impact on gun violence. Still I’m for them.
Of course we don’t, this isn’t a problem that is going to be solved by waving a magic wand and making everything right. If we are lucky and take the right steps now our grand children might live in a country that isn’t drowning in guns, and their grand children might actually get a civilized country. Expecting anything more than that is simply delusional.
Yeah, between the scripted crying and the less-than-earthshaking nature of the announcement (“We’re going to tighten rules that we could have tightened any time in the last 7 years”), it looks like this is mainly a media event so Obama can show that he’s doing “something” about gun violence.
It appears that Obama is demanding that anyone who buys or sells two firearms must become a licensed dealer who must then be registered as a gun owner and subjected to the same annual BATFE inspections as gun shops.
I believe the BATFE already has a history of driving gun shops out of business for minor book keeping errors. If this EO isn’t overturned by a future President, the BATFE can begin harassing every gunowner for owning firearms. That sounds very un-Constitutional.
Not to anyone that has actually read the proposals…or did you not see the words “when other factors also were present” after “as little as two weapons”?
Pretty much exactly what I posted: They need to pin down more what defines a 'dealer". I do like that this will stop a few ‘dealers’ that dont have FFLs from selling guns, but I dont want a hobbyist to get arrested over this- say a Cowboy Action Shooter or a Collector that trades a few guns a year.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press...e-and-make-our
Quantity and frequency of sales are relevant indicators. There is no specific threshold number of firearms purchased or sold that triggers the licensure requirement. But it is important to note that even a few transactions, when combined with other evidence, can be sufficient to establish that a person is “engaged in the business.” For example, courts have upheld convictions for dealing without a license when as few as two firearms were sold or when only one or two transactions took place, when other factors also were present.
They need to give a minimum 'safe harbor", let us say four a year.
I suspect the rules will be modeled on well-established IRS revenue rulings on hobby losses, which tend to focus on whether the (purported) seller makes a profit.
I suspect also, but it’s unclear and open to abuse. And the IRS revenue rulings on hobby losses focus on many more things than just profit.
Again, there’s a qualifying phrase-“…when combined with other evidence” that has to be factored in. Perhaps there’s some other factors that we in the public sector don’t know about that mark certain low-volume transactions as being suspicious, so I would hesitate at setting a solid number limit.
Motivations here are different. The IRS is concerned about people who have businesses that continually run losses and those people attempting to deduct these losses as business losses. The IRS may determine that your business activity is no longer a business, but a hobby, whereby you are only allowed to deduct losses to the extent you have income.
In the FFL situation, the government is attempting to find people that say they are “hobbyist”, but in reality they are in the business of selling firearms. And thus require them to be under the FFL requirements.
If I have 10 firearms of different calibers that I have collected over the years through purchase or inheritance from family members and decide one day that I don’t want them anymore and I sell all of them at a profit or a loss, that doesn’t make me a dealer.
If I regularly buy firearms from individuals selling them in private transactions and I in turn around regularly sell firearms to other individuals in private transactions, sometimes making a profit, sometimes not, then I am dealing in firearms and should be subject to the requirements.
Again, nothing new here. Just enforcing existing laws.
Add a few tears and put it on TV and you’ve got nothing but an old fashioned political grandstanding, with applause and support from your base.
BATFE doesn’t have the manpower to inspect gun shops annually; in an average year, they get around to 15-20%, and because they tend to focus on larger operations and known problem children, it’s not unusual to find an gun dealer who hasn’t been inspected in a decade or more. (As of 2013, the agency’s goal was one inspection every three to five years, and they weren’t anywhere close to that goal; over half of gun dealers hadn’t been inspected in at least five years. Cite.) In 2014, just seven percent of licensees were inspected.
Moreover, the law requires that the BATFE prove any violations were “willful” before attempting to revoke a license, and around 97% of the dealers who were found to be non-compliant were allowed to agree to make changes to bring themselves into compliance. Fewer than one percent of the dealers who violated the law faced any threat to their license.
For example, Shawano Gun & Loan in Wisconsin had a long-running dispute with federal investigators, who found blatant examples of straw buyers (felon fails background check, clerk immediately sells gun to felon’s wife or girlfriend or brother). The feds found the store could not account for 145 guns in 1999; a 2004 inspection revealed the store had sold firearms to people who wrote on the background check form (Form 4473) that they were not eligible to buy. The feds didn’t even recommend revocation until 2007 and the store wasn’t shuttered until appeals were exhausted in 2011. (The store was then sold, and is apparently open under new ownership, to wit the previous owner’s nephew.)
The definition of gun dealer isn’t set by law–it’s determined largely by regulation and by agency policy. That definition is changing. Change, by definition, means something new.
(The feds are also going to assign another couple hundred people to work on background checks; again, that’s a change.)
If the White House held a press conference every time there was a definitional change in the code of regulations, they would have to start a 24 hour channel that held nothing but these types of announcements.
And hiring a few hundred people to fulfill their already established obligation in an organization that already employs about 2.7 million people isn’t worth having a press conference about.
This was about political grandstanding.