40 Gun Control Proposals on White House Desks

Most gun owners are thankful that Congress managed to stay largely pro-gun in Tuesday’s election – a deterrent, they believe, to keeping President Obama’s extreme anti-gun history in check and off the federal agenda. Unfortunately, there’s bad news for those folks. The White House and relevant agencies already have a 40-point plan to enact new gun controls without any check from Congress. Not a single vote must be cast where we have a chance to lobby our local members of the House or two Senators.

Chuck Michel is responsible for filing the FOIA request to get the plans out and public where they belong*, and we can see a “blueprint” provided to the Obama administration by NYC’s Michael Bloomberg back in 2009. Why would the President sit on this blueprint for three years? Well, as he promised Russian officials in a hot mic moment, he knows he’ll have more “flexibility” in his second term since he knows he will never have to worry about winning an election again.

If this document doesn’t convince you that MAIG is a significantly more serious threat than any other gun control organization out there, nothing will. Whoever wrote this knows ATF very well and understands federal gun laws well enough to know how to effectively make changes using only administrative and regulatory changes, which do not require action from the US Congress. While some of the 40 recommendations are not objectionable, quite a number of them are. Let me go down the list and pick out some of the worst offenders, and this is by no means a comprehensive list.

• Require REAL ID compliant identification for all gun purchasers. Those in non-complying states, which are many, will no longer be permitted to buy firearms.
• Recommends a ban on the importation of all “non-sporting” firearms and ammunition, and specifically calls for banning the FN Five-Seven. Kiss cheap imported rounds of military caliber goodbye. Maybe kiss Glocks goodbye, too. MAIG isn’t all that specific on what would be sporting or non-sporting. Also note that MAIG can no longer claim they do not advocate banning guns. They do.
• Calls for keeping records for people who get a NICS default proceed, which means your background check has not “cleared,” but you went through the required three day waiting period. These records can be kept for up to 20 years, in the case of someone whose name matches someone on the “terror watch” list and six months ordinarily. Default proceeds can happen if NICS has incomplete records, or the system is down for a protracted period of time.
• Calls for more enforcement of gun shows using the Richmond model. The techniques used at the Richmond gun shows were bad enough that Congress held hearings about the methods, and demanded ATF put a stop to them. They actually recommend rescinding a number of the changes made to prevent these abuses.
• Recommends ways for the administration to exploit loopholes in the Tiahrt Amendment to publish information on “problematic” gun dealers (so they can be sued by New York City, no doubt). As has been pointed out before, having a lot of traces doesn’t necessarily mean a dealer is breaking the law.
• Lots of recommendations for new record keeping requirements on the part of FFLs.
• Requiring placement of alternate serial numbers of every newly manufactured gun, and requiring serial numbers to be deeper and larger. Also require that a consistent serial numbering scheme be adopted across all manufacturers and importers.
• Asks ATF to promote MAIG’s Responsible Dealer Partnership Program that they foisted on Wal-Mart, much like they do with NSSF’s “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy.” They imply NSSF’s program does not go far enough.
• Asks the CPSC to mandate gun safety lock standards. Gun dealers are required to provide these, but many gun owners are older, or younger, and do not have children. This would be a way to add substantially to the cost of a firearm, if a $30 lock needed to be included with each sale.
• Extend the multiple purchase reporting requirement to long guns, especially ARs, .50-caliber firearms, and Kalashnikov variants. MAIG is not very clear on this, and I think it would be difficult for dealers to keep track of the current state of regulation.
• Specifically calls for the Stinger Pen Gun to be reclassified as an AOW. I had never heard of this before, but I guess it really pisses off someone in the New York Mayor’s office, which is a good enough reason, if any, to go buy one.

There can be no doubt now that MAIG is a gun control group, and a particularly dangerous one. This blueprint is comprehensive, and very well put together. Whoever helped MAIG with this knows what they are talking about, and I would imagine is a former higher up at ATF, since it evinces a detailed knowledge of how ATF works, and what their weaknesses are.

Regardless of whether your mayor is working with Bloomberg on this radical agenda, we do know for a fact that these proposals are already sitting in Washington. The blueprint has an appendix that highlights the ease of implementation for any administration that wants to do as much as they possibly can to restrict gun rights without having to be accountable to Congress or citizens.

*A similar file is now available through Bloomberg’s anti-gun site. However, in 2009 when most of this post was developed, Bloomberg fought to keep his plan a secret. His organization only spoke to trusted media friends about it and refused to release the full contents for public review. It was only through FOIA that citizens were granted access to the documents once they were put on the desks of Administration officials.