Here’s the Latest Bright Idea for Regulating Guns.

So, yesterday I get an email from Everytown asking me to contact my Representative in D.C. and ask him to support a new bill called The Federal Firearms Licensing Act (FFLA.) According to this email, which was signed by someone named Monisha Henley, Senior V.P. of Government Affairs for Everytown, this law will “strengthen and modernize the laws that licensed gun dealers must follow — like implementing measures to prevent theft and loss — and would hold sellers accountable when they fail to follow them.”

I never heard of this FFLA bill, so before sending an email to my Rep, who happens to be Jim McGovern (a good guy, btw) I went to look at the details of the proposed legislation itself. You can read the entire text of the bill — H.R.1478 — here, but I’ll save you the trouble and summarize it right now.

Basically, the bill clarifies one of the major issues which has been floating around the gun world since the federal government created a comprehensive system to regulate gun dealers in 1968. The issue is this: How do we define an individual who deals in guns, as opposed to someone who just buys and sells guns as a hobby, the way that other people buy books or records or toys?

This new bill defines a gun ‘dealer’ as anyone who makes purchases or sales of guns more than 5 times within any 12-month period of time. In order to buy, sell or transfer a sixth gun during those same 12 months, the individual must become a federally-licensed dealer, which means not only going through the whole legal rigamarole to get a dealer’s license (application form, photos, fingerprints, local police approval, high fee), but must also have a physical location which meets certain standards (locked cabinets, video, alarms, etc.) for secure storage of all guns.

Over the past 20 or so years, in addition to my own retail gun shop, I have probably gone into more than 50-gun shops in a dozen or more states. Most of these shops are operated by retired guys whose wives didn’t want them hanging around the house all day long, plus the wife got fed up not having enough room in the closets for her clothes because that’s where the shotguns and rifles were stacked up. The handguns would be stuffed under the pillows of the living room couch.

The reason there’s all this talk about ‘rogue’ gun dealers as being a main cause of gun violence is because the ATF has been consciously lying about their so-called regulatory activities, and since the people who both make gun laws and people like the good people who run Everytown and support gun laws know nothing about guns, the ATF gets away with creating a narrative about how they operate which has nothing to do with reality at all.

When a gun is picked up at a crime scene and the ATF is asked to conduct a trace, they send a request to the name of the company which manufactured or imported the gun. Under federal law, every gun manufactured since the 1940’s must have the manufacturer’s name and a unique serial number which is the information used by the ATF to initiate a trace.

The factory responds to the ATF by sending the name of the dealer or distributor which received the new gun, and the ATF then sends this recipient another trace request. The dealer or distributor gets the trace request and has 24 hours to respond to the ATF with the name and address of the individual who received the gun.

That’s all fine and well except for one little thing. At least 40% of all guns that are picked up by the cops and are then traced, have been sold by gun dealers several times. Guns don’t’ wear out. They’re not like used cars. I own a Colt pistol manufactured in 1922 and it shoots as well today as it shot the first time it left the factory after it was made.

The ATF says that they can only run a trace on a gun which covers the first time the gun was sold. Know where they get this regulation from? They made it up. There is no such regulation in any law covering how gun dealers operate or how dealers are regulated by the ATF.

There is not one word in this FFLA law which says anything at all about how the ATF goes about tracing a gun or how the agency should go about tracing a gun. So, I am being asked by Everytown to tell Representative McGovern to support a new gun-control law which allows the ATF (and the government, btw) to continue regulating gun commerce in a way that makes no sense at all.

Have I made this exact, same point in at least ten blogs over the past twelve years? But this time the FFLA law will really make a difference, right?