Bump-stock rule, pistol-brace rule, engaged-in-the-business rule — all gone or going. An agency that cannot win a case should not be drafting the next one.
Take inventory. In the last 36 months, the ATF has lost the bump-stock rule at the Supreme Court, had the pistol-brace rule vacated by the Fifth Circuit, had 'engaged in the business' enjoined nationwide, and watched the solicitor general decline to defend several of its own enforcement positions. The agency's batting average on contested rulemaking is somewhere between 'abysmal' and 'embarrassing.'
An agency with that record doesn't need a new director, a new logo, or a new community-outreach working group. It needs to be put on a leash.
The first move is budgetary: Congress controls the purse, and the appropriations rider that prohibits ATF from using funds to finalize any new regulation governing ordinary lawful firearms is one vote away from permanent. The second is structural: split the enforcement function (investigating trafficking, straw purchases, violent prohibited possessors) from the regulatory function (licensing, classifications, rulemaking). Let the former do its job. Starve the latter.
The third is cultural, and it's on gun owners. Stop treating ATF classification letters like law. They aren't. Stop treating agency guidance as binding. It isn't. When the rule in front of you was written by an agency that lost its last six fights in federal court, the correct default posture is skepticism — and the correct response to ambiguity is litigation, not compliance.
The ATF does not have a mandate problem. It has a legitimacy problem. And legitimacy is something you earn back in decades, not press releases.
"You don't fix an agency by giving it new authority. You fix it by taking away the authority it has already proven it cannot be trusted with."← More Stories