There have been questions raised about whether or not President-Elect Trump will be as good for gun rights as he claimed. I maintain that it really doesn’t matter considering what a rabid anti-gunner he was running against. He was clearly the only sane choice.
While he won’t take office until January, he’s rolling out his nominees for various positions. One of the more…interesting ones is now-former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz is probably one of the more controversial picks so far. There’s a lot of baggage surrounding Gaetz, including some very unsavory allegations, which is going to make his confirmation more of a challenge than most of Trump’s other picks. Couple that with the fact that Gaetz isn’t exactly what you’d call demure and, as a result, has pissed off a lot of the more squishy members of the GOP and you’ve got an even bigger challenge.
As such, we should temper any expectations for the future understanding that.
However, should he get confirmed, things are going to really get uncomfortable for a lot of people in the anti-gun camp.
See, the attorney general runs the Department of Justice. It’s one of those rare cases where the person who runs a department doesn’t have the title “secretary of whatever.” That means he’ll be in charge of, among other things, the ATF.
This is the same Rep. Matt Gaetz who introduced the Abolish the ATF Act at the beginning of 2023.
Now, that wasn’t going to happen and I said so when I wrote about this one last year. If Gaetz is confirmed, he won’t have the power to abolish the office, either. That’ll take an act of Congress.
But what he can do is slap it down and slap it down hard. Coupled with whoever Trump taps to run the ATF, it’s entirely likely that the ATF will be forced to take a step back and stop going after law-abiding gun dealers over paperwork errors or other good-faith mistakes and, instead, actually go after criminals for a change.
I know, I know, that seems like crazy talk.
Plus, as the FBI director’s boss, Gaetz would be able to put a stop to the extrajudicial efforts of the FBI to pressure people into signing away their gun rights in exchange for not being prosecuted.
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Gaetz has made every signal possible that he’d be good for gun rights in an office like that of the attorney general, primarily by being good on gun rights as a member of Congress. Even before then, he successfully defended Florida’s Stand Your Ground law while in the state legislature.
Honestly, while there may be concerns about Gaetz, and I’m not going to comment on those one way or another, we do know for certain that there aren’t going to be all that many options for President-Elect Trump that will be better for the Second Amendment than him.
I suspect he could probably find someone if he tried, and he might have to since at least some Republicans in the Senate are freaking over Gaetz’s nomination, but we do know that if he’s confirmed, our Second Amendment rights will be safe enough for a couple of years at least.
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