Trump DOJ wants to speed up sales and transfers of machine guns. That’s the incendiary headline hovering over an abcnews.go.com story revealing — eventually — that the Department of Justice wants an additional $13.2m in the ATF budget to reduce NFA wait times. And when I say eventually, I mean after 10 paragraphs of machine gun misegos . . .
After last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people, President Donald Trump called for a ban on so-called bump stock devices that he said “turn legal weapons into machine guns.”
But at the same time, his administration is quietly pushing for millions more to allow the federal government to speed up approvals for the sale and transfer of actual machine guns . . .
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, calls making approvals for machine gun purchases a priority “unconscionable.”
“Our country has seen three dozen mass shootings since 20 children and 6 educators were murdered at Sandy Hook…Rather than focusing on a top gun lobby demand the administration should put money toward ATF to hire additional agents and improve the background check system,” Feinstein said.
Machine gun transfers account for a small percentage of the ATF’s NFA workload. The vast majority of their bureaucratic burden concern silencers. A fact that ABC buries even deeper in their hoplophobic hysteria.
Hysteria that somehow has to take account of these fascinating facts (and thanks for the pic of the ATF’s reference library). . .
The latest 2017 ATF data shows there are more than 630,000 machine guns registered with the ATF and more than 1.36 million silencers registered. Last year, according to ATF, more than 5.2 million weapons were registered under the NFA.
Wow! There are 630k machine guns in the U.S. and there hasn’t been a single post-Prohibition mass shooting with any of them? More than 1.36 million silencers and not a single whisper-quiet assassination?
Speaking of violent crime . . .
According to President Trump’s budget request, the additional funding would pay for 25 more people to “support the timely and effective registration of restricted weapons under the National Firearms Act while upholding the constitutional rights of the American people.”
But current and former ATF officials who spoke to ABC News on the condition of anonymity say reducing the backlog of applications for NFA restricted weapons has little to do with violent crime. “It would have minimal to no effect on combatting violent crime,” one former ATF official said. “It appears to be a compromise for the gun lobby,” the former official added.
They almost said it: machine guns and silencers have no effect on violent crime. Put that in your Second Amendment pipe and smoke it.