Let’s Not Get Too Excited About ‘Purge’ of Gun Laws

I’m the type of person who believes there are no unconstitutional gun control laws. We have the right to keep and bear arms, and to me, that means I should be able to buy something belt-fed from Amazon and have it shipped to my house.

Unfortunately, that’s not remotely possible without everyone involved having a plethora of licenses so we could do such a thing. That’s wrong.

The Trump administration has already positioned itself to be the most pro-gun administration in living history, if not history as a whole. That’s a good thing, to say the least.

However, I think a lot of people are getting a bit excited.

At America’s 1st Freedom, Charles C.W. Cooke wrote a piece titled, “The Constitutional Purge of Bad Gun Laws.”

This caught my attention because it seemingly promises something that, frankly, I don’t see happening quite that way.

Yet Cooke didn’t just stop with the headline, obviously.

“The Second Amendment,” the document begins, “is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty.” As such, it continues, “the Attorney General shall examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies (agencies) to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens, and present a proposed plan of action to the President.”

As the order makes clear, the most obvious effect of the measure could be to rescind a host of the legal positions that the Biden administration took between “January 2021 through January 2025”—including changing the definition of a “pistol brace,” changing the definition of a person who is “engaged in the business” of selling firearms and changing the definition of a “frame or receiver”—as well as to put a permanent end to the ATF’s disastrous “zero-tolerance” program, which, by design, treated the manufacturers and retailers of guns as if they were the enemy.

Given that, as this was going to print, the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the Biden administration’s attempt to regulate so-called “ghost guns,” the “zero-tolerance” treatment might be the first priority that the White House has in mind for remedial action. But, over the next couple of years, we seem likely to see administrative rulemaking processes that curb the excesses of the Biden administration’s executive gun-control agenda.

In and of itself, this would represent a salutary shift. But, when one looks more closely at the order’s language, one begins to understand that its ambitions are far, far broader than the mere restoration of the status quo. The document refers to “all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements and other actions.” It seeks to “assess any ongoing infringements.” And this scope is described as the “minimum”!

This was, of course, written well before we knew a lot of things, including the fact that we still wouldn’t have seen any report by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office.

We’ve seen some very good moves from it, but we still haven’t seen any march through the unconstitutional gun laws and taking them to the proverbial woodshed.

There’s been some good work, to be sure, but there’s a lot left to do, and a lot of people echo Cooke’s headline without his restraint, and those folks need to hold up just a bit.

Yes, tons of gun laws need to go. The Department of Justice is somewhat limited on what it can do, as is the Trump administration as a whole. A lot of people want everything to happen all at once and are downright furious that it hasn’t. I get it, but let’s calm down.

We didn’t lose our rights in a day, a week, a month, or a year. 

As such, it’s ridiculous to think we’ll get them all back just that fast, especially when there’s so much popular support for certain laws. Yes, popularity shouldn’t impact our rights one way or the other–they’re our rights, not something that should be up for a vote–but it does impact the politics of the situation.

We need a little patience. We shouldn’t get too carried away.

With that said, there are things I want to see happen and that the Department of Justice has the authority to address, such as repealing the idiotic “ghost gun” rules, the pistol brace rules, an end to cutting barrels on imported firearms kits, and a host of other measures.

Let’s just not get too carried away.