Earlier this year, Gun Owners of America leaked internal ATF documents, highlighting an unprecedented rate of Federal Firearms Licenses revoked by the Biden administration’s ATF.
In fact, since the enactment of ATF’s Zero Tolerance policy, there has been a 200% increase in FFL revocations. This is due to the agency’s new interpretation of the word “willful.”
Congress has made clear that, when revoking a license, ATF is required to prove that an FFL “willfully” violated the law before the statutory punishments can be levied.
This deliberate addition to the law by Congress presented a problem for ATF, as virtually all gun dealers are well-intentioned, law-abiding people who always attempt to comply with the law.
Therefore, to claim “willfulness” to violate the law by people who almost uniformly try to follow the law — ATF had to get creative.
Now, ATF claims that a single manual, potentially given to an FFL decades ago, proves that the FFL knew the law and thus “willfully” decided to violate it.
By Tyler Durden