Gun Owners of America (GOA) and its affiliate, Gun Owners Foundation (GOF), filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the ATF, charging that it is unlawfully shutting down gun dealers for even the most trivial of bookkeeping errors.
The ATF is the weapon being used by the Biden administration to shut down all gun dealers, making it ultimately impossible for law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling from the U.S. District Court in North Dakota to restrain the ATF from “implementing … a Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) ‘zero tolerance’ policy that … has been wielded as a political weapon … to revoke the federal firearms licenses (‘FFL’) of numerous gun dealers across the nation.”
The GOA and GOF represent Morehouse Enterprises (doing business with the public as Bridge City Ordnance (BCO) in Valley City, North Dakota) which, with the help of these same groups, filed a complaint against the ATF in July 2022 over its “ghost gun” overreach. Just a few months later Bridge City Ordnance was singled out for an “inspection” by the ATF — the first and only such inspection since Bridge City Ordnance opened for business — which found some minor bookkeeping errors among the more than 5,000 transactions it examined.
The ATF began the process of revoking BCO’s federal firearms license, and Morehouse filed the present lawsuit as a result.
The move to ban all gun dealers was announced just months after the Biden administration took control of the government, issuing its “Fact Sheet” in June 2021:
Today, the Justice Department is announcing a new policy to underscore zero tolerance for willful violations of the law by federally licensed firearms dealers.… ATF will seek to revoke the licenses of dealers the first time that they violate federal law….
The ATF revised its procedures to reflect the new policy, removing discretion for ATF agents to consider rare instances of minor mistakes as merely bookkeeping or paperwork errors, and not sufficient grounds for revocation of the gun dealer’s license.
In announcing the lawsuit, Erich Pratt, GOA’s senior vice president, said:
This zero-tolerance policy towards lawful commerce guaranteed by the Second Amendment is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing federal agencies against their political enemies.
It also is just one more compelling piece of evidence to support gun owners’ demands that Congress defund the ATF.
Sam Paredes, on behalf of the board of GOF, added:
It’s ridiculous that good people trying to make an honest living are facing this assault on their livelihoods simply over inconsequential paperwork errors. [S]mall businesses fac[e] devastating consequences if this Administration’s hostility towards firearms is permitted to go unchecked.
In 2022, under the new “guidelines,” the ATF inspected almost 7,000 gun dealers and found errors in nearly half of them. They revoked the licenses of 90 of them, while more than 1,000 gun dealers, under pressure no doubt from the jackbooted thugs representing the ATF, quit. So the Biden “zero tolerance” policy is working to slowly strangle and kill all sources from which Americans can purchase firearms.
Twenty-five members of the House of Representatives expressed their great displeasure at the weaponization of the ATF for Biden’s purposes, noting that “local ATF field agents … feel pressured to take actions against individual businesses … and [are] being forced to compete [with each other] on the number of licenses [they have] revoked.… ATF Directors … are being told to press forward with this escalating quota system or face professional repercussions.”
This is the current state of the ongoing war against the private ownership of guns in the United States. The ATF, along with the IRS, is conducting increasingly audacious raids and attacks on legitimate gun owners, including, as The New American reported last month, Adventure Outdoor in Atlanta and Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana.
