The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has taken its anti “free American people” overreach to a whole new level.
According to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), on Monday, March 27, “The ATF showed up with 16 agents, most from out-of-state from cities like LA and San Francisco, to ‘inspect’ Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna, GA.”
Fortunately for the gun store, Representative Greene and some members of the Georgia congressional delegation intervened and confronted the IOIs on the details of their task. Greene tweeted, “I’m proud to have joined my colleagues to do our job and conduct Congressional Oversight on this highly suspect “inspection.”
“This visit was unprecedented. The sheer amount of agents from the bluest parts of the country is unusual and unnecessary to conduct a routine audit,” she continued.
Those 16 agents are what the ATF calls “Industry Operations Investigators” (IOIs) and they are deployed to “support ATF’s regulatory mission by conducting regular inspections and investigations into regulated firearms and explosives industries.” As of 2020, there were well over 800 IOIs in the United States, working in field offices spread in major cities throughout the country.
It is very common for IOIs to conduct surprise inspections. The ATF website says that IOIs “work closely with new and existing licensees to make sure their businesses meet all federal laws and regulations. They inspect their records and inventories to make sure all items are documented correctly and stored safely.” It is highly irregular for them to show up with 16 agents, however. It is even more out of the ordinary for those agents to be flown in from some of the most progressive parts of the country.
According to the ATF’s website, part of the IOIs job description includes looking “for evidence of trafficking and other criminal activities.” What better way to find a needle in a haystack than to employ almost two dozen of our best and brightest men and women to search for minutiae on the dime of the American taxpayer?
Lee Williams from the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) released a statement in May of 2022 that may shed some light on the agent overkill that accompanied the ATF’s most recent overreach. In the statement, Williams analyzed the Biden administration’s record and found something profound. He writes, “In the 11 months since Joe Biden declared war on ‘rogue gun dealers,’ the ATF has revoked 273 FFLs — an increase of more than 500%. However, rather than targeting the true rogues, Biden’s ATF is revoking FFLs for the most minor of paperwork errors, which were never a concern for the ATF until Biden weaponized the agency.”
The SAF reported speaking with John Clark of FFL Consultants. Clark is a firearm industry expert who said the ATF announced the number of revocations at a recent Firearm Industry Conference. Clark exclaimed, “This has nothing to do with the ATF and everything to do with the DOJ…. The vast majority of the ATF don’t like this any more than the industry does,” he said. “It’s Biden.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “This is a prime example of Joe Biden and the Democrats weaponizing federal agencies to silence and intimidate their political opponents. I fear this is just the beginning and they are directly targeting our Second Amendment and our right to protect and defend our families.”
It is such a joy to see our elected officials exercising their oversight authority under their constitutional charge for which we create governments and consent to be governed: to secure our rights.
“To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” If our representatives don’t secure our rights, then how much suffering will we endure until the national government trespasses become insufferable? I hope that all of our readers will send a message of thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Georgia congressional delegation who participated for their example and their courage to take that unconstitutional and overboard bureaucracy to task and secure our rights.
