What's a politician to do when it's clear that people will vigorously resist attempts to restrict their lives? Well, you could empower government officials to arbitrarily punish anybody who might help them exercise their freedom. That's the approach favored by three Democratic members of Congress, who appear to see the path to limiting private firearms ownership in harassing gun dealers and subjecting them to the whims of government officials.
Not that they're the only legislators to wield regulations as bludgeons, but it's always a lousy idea.
Ostensibly, the "Keeping Gun Dealers Honest Act"... is aimed at "gun dealers who engage in illegal sales practices," which is to say it's supposed to make it more illegal to do illegal stuff. This isn't a new practice—Representatives Ted Deutch (D – Fla), Jim Langevin (D – R.I.), and Gwen Moore (D – Wis.) are hardly alone among lawmakers in thinking that what the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world (although we should take a few countries' official numbers with a grain of salt) needs is more people behind bars. And these three are also in good company in thinking that augmenting legal penalties with arbitrary harassment is the key to a better world.
The column summarizes the provisions in the legislation and then asks, who believes the feds do not need these new powers? The ATF
"The [licensed gun dealers] who willfully violate the laws and regulations preventing ATF from accomplishing its mission to protect the public are few," the Bureau says on its website. The ATF emphasizes that, as the law requires, it acts "where willfulness is demonstrated" in violations of the law.
Has ATF abused authority in the past?
The law requires willfulness so that enforcement doesn't become a game of whack-a-mole over inadvertent paperwork violations and regulatory missteps—something that gun owners and dealers claimed in the past was precisely the case. Before the 1986 legal change allowing gun licenses to be revoked only when regulations are "willfully" violated, the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution found that "[a]pproximately 75% of BATF gun prosecutions were aimed at ordinary citizens who had neither criminal intent nor knowledge, but were enticed by agents into unknowing technical violations."
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