I spotted an odd headline today.

Biden Administration Preparing to Ban Private Gun Sales: Whistleblowers
President Joe Biden’s administration has drafted a document that would effectively ban private gun sales by requiring background checks for all transactions, even those made between private citizens, according to a whistleblower group.

That would be Empower Oversight, more of a whistleblower support organization. But why we need “whistleblowers” to tell us that the ATF is sneaking around to change the rules is odd…

Since they published the Notice of Proposed Rule-Making last year. You commented on it, right? Maybe your comments even got posted. Maybe.

What Empower Oversight did was send a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland about those devious miscreants at the ATF.

The draft rule received immense comment and was interpreted by many to require that any private citizen who sells even a single firearm online might be required to register as an FFL…

Yep. I certainly did. Because it would.

This proposed rule, essentially requiring any person, selling a single firearm to pay bills, to first obtain a Federal Firearms License (FFL), is blatantly unconstitutional. It also would not work as advertised, and would even be counter-productive.

But back to EO’s letter.

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…despite clear language in law since 1986 that the term “engaged in the business” of selling firearms “shall not include a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms,”

They are referring to the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986. And yes, that language was there. But they missed the bit in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 that The Zelman Partisans warned you about.

When we heard that these senate scum would “clarify” what it means to be in the “business” of selling firearms — requiring an FFL — I hoped, but didn’t actually expect, that they might finally set a threshold for number of sales in a defined time period. That isn’t what we’ve gotten.

Instead, they changed the definition from “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” to “predominantly earn a profit”.

No longer would you need to be selling enough guns to make a living. Just a single sale, if your intent is to make money, suffices to require a Federal Firearms License. There is no exception for sales to friends or family. There is no exception for sales to pay off medical bills.

They legislatively changed the old 1986 definition. The ATF’s rule is “merely” implementing the law.

Perhaps Empower Oversight should assign someone to watch TZP for updates like that.