By the time you read this, Attorney General Pam Bondi should have examined “all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies (agencies) to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens, and present a proposed plan of action to the President, through the Domestic Policy Advisor, to protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.”
Bondi was directed to accomplish this task last month by President Donald Trump by way of an executive order headlined “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” Issued Feb. 7, it brought cheers from gun rights organizations and groans (and worse) from the gun prohibition lobby.
The president spelled out his intention in Section 1 of the order: “The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty. It has preserved the right of the American people to protect ourselves, our families, and our freedoms since the founding of our great Nation. Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.”
About that time, my colleague Lee Williams (aka “The Gunwriter”), who also reports as the SAF Investigative Journalism Project for the Second Amendment Foundation, revealed an interesting website called Data Republican which, according to its main page, has tracked down where “billions of dollars” in government grants and charities goes, including tens of thousands of dollars which allegedly winds up in the coffers of U.S. gun control organizations.
Williams wrote about it at TheGunMag.com and other pro-gun-rights news sites.
Not Just Money
Skip the money for now. Let’s talk about the Trump order and the reaction.
Within 48 hours of taking office in January, the president abolished Joe Biden’s “White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.” It was a not-so-thinly-disguised gun control group whose job was essentially to help formulate gun control schemes for the former administration and promote them, especially to “blue” states controlled by Democrats.
Long story short, Trump’s executive order shifted administration gun policy a full 180 degrees, ordering Bondi to review, at a minimum:
(i) All Presidential and agencies’ actions from January 2021 through January 2025 that purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens;
(ii) Rules promulgated by the Department of Justice, including by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, from January 2021 through January 2025 pertaining to firearms and/or Federal firearms licensees;
(iii) Agencies’ plans, orders, and actions regarding the so-called “enhanced regulatory enforcement policy” pertaining to firearms and/or Federal firearms licensees;
(iv) Reports and related documents issued by the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention;
(v) The positions taken by the United States in any and all ongoing and potential litigation that affects or could affect the ability of Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights;
(vi) Agencies’ classifications of firearms and ammunition; and
(vii) The processing of applications to make, manufacture, transfer, or export firearms.
Where the Biden-Harris administration had declared war on gun owners, gun dealers and the industry, Trump last month set in motion what appears to be the dismantling of his predecessor’s gun ban agenda. And gun prohibitionists were spitting fire.
Mark Collins, national policy director for Brady United, asserted in a prepared statement that existing gun policies “were perfectly in line with Second Amendment rights, and we’re hoping that at the end of this review, there might be some restraint and objectivity.”
If that didn’t cause you to roll your eyes, former Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords had this to say in her own press release: “The Second Amendment isn’t under attack. GIFFORDS built a coalition of thousands of gun owners who, like me, know that there is no conflict between the Second Amendment and commonsense gun safety. Any effort to repeal important, lifesaving measures will harm public safety and put our children at risk. The safety of our families, our children, our schools and our communities is not a partisan issue. That’s not what Americans voted for in November.”
She was partly right. The Second Amendment isn’t under attack anymore, at least not for a while.
Possible Undoing?
Courthouse News intimated there is more at stake than just Biden-era gun control measures, although those restrictions are a good place to start.
Possible targets: the pistol brace restriction, the private assembly of unserialized firearms, from parts and/or kits (often called “ghost guns”), “expanded background checks” and so-called “secure firearm storage.”
There are also concerns within the gun prohibition lobby that under Bondi’s leadership, the Justice Department will review “any and all ongoing and potential litigation that affects or could affect the ability of Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.” Under the previous administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was “weaponized” against gun owners and small-time, legitimate gun dealers.
And Then …
There’s more, of course, and the inside-the-Beltway gun control crowd doesn’t like this, either.
Comes now the “Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act,” a second-time-around piece of legislation introduced last month by freshman Congressman Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican leading a group of at least 25 House members. The thrust of this bill is to prevent financial institutions and credit card companies from setting up a special Merchant Category Code for gun dealers as a way to track your gun and ammunition purchases paid for with credit cards.
This invasive effort actually got started back in 2022, when Joe Biden was in office. A little background is probably warranted. At the time, the International Organization for Standardization — which describes itself as a “non-governmental international organization” that sets all kinds of standards by bringing “global experts together to agree on the best ways of doing things.” Yeah, it sounds like trouble to me, too.
Anyway, the ISO at the time created a special four-digit code to apply to gun stores. This “Merchant Category Code” (MCC) would be used to track the credit card gun and ammunition purchases. But wait a minute! Critics immediately recognized this as a backdoor registration scheme which would capture all of this information, tracking gun owners.
To get around this, many gun owners started making their purchases exclusively with cash. Now, Rep. Moore and his colleagues want to make it a matter of federal law that gun/ammo-specific MCCs are a no-no.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, had this to say: “Gun control advocates have tried all manner of privacy invasions over the years, and tracking personal purchases of legal, constitutionally protected products is among the worst examples of such insidious efforts … It is none of anyone’s business what honest citizens buy and own, and it is certainly none of the government’s business to micro-manage their lives. Passage of the PPPA will prevent such nonsense from becoming part of our government framework.”
