Does Biden’s gun grab pass the smell test?

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.”

The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so…

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.”

The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so via a federal background check.

“Proponents of gun control call the fact that federal law does not require a background check on sales by persons who are not licensed as dealers a gun show loophole,” explained James Bardwell, in-house attorney for the National Association for Gun Rights. “In reality, the ‘loophole’ refers to sales by unlicensed sellers anywhere they are conducted, whether at a gun show or elsewhere.”

The Biden Department of Justice finalized a rule yesterday aimed at closing the “loophole” by amending Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulations regarding sales of guns. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that under the new regulation, “It will not matter if guns are sold on the internet, at a gun show or at a brick-and-mortar store: if you sell guns predominantly to earn a profit, you must be licensed, and you must conduct background checks.”

Are gun sales carried out by non-FFL holders a huge problem? The ATF recently found they are not. Breitbart reported this week on the agency’s National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment, which found only 3.2 percent of ATF intrastate trafficking cases, and only 4.3 percent of ATF interstate trafficking cases involve “trafficking in firearms at gun shows, flea markets or auctions.”

And would more background checks stop more gun-related crime? Well, for starters, most criminals, by definition, are not going to follow the law while acquiring the guns they plan to use in committing crimes. As the DoJ reported in 2019, “Fewer than one in fifty (less than 2 percent) of all prisoners had obtained a firearm from a retail source…” Most criminals steal guns, find them at crime scenes or acquire them through a straw purchase. Plus, even if they were to undergo a background check, there’s a good chance they could get a gun anyway, as the background check system is “fundamentally flawed” and ineffective.

-Teresa Mull

On our radar

THINK TANKS UNDER ATTACK The Heritage Foundation was the subject of a cyber attack Wednesday that a security vendor determined was conducted by Chinese or Russian nation-state actors, a Heritage official told Politico.

FEES BY DNC President Joe Biden had more than $1.5 million in legal fees accrued during the DoJ’s probe into his handling of classified documents were covered by campaign donations, even though Biden has criticized Trump for having his legal fees paid in part by the RNC.

‘CROSSED A RED LINE’ Former CBS News journalist Catherine Herridge testified to Congress that her former employer locked her out of her office and seized her files, including information about confidential sources, that were related to a story exposing government corruption.

House Freedom Caucus chair goes rogue

The chair of the Freedom Caucus is waging war against the establishment, while simultaneously begging said establishment to save him from Donald Trump’s wrath.

In recent weeks, Congressman Bob Good has endorsed for and against a slew of his Republican colleagues, all while fending off a fierce primary challenger who has the backing of much of Trumpworld due to Good’s previous support for Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign.

House experts note that there’s no real ideological consistency behind many of Good’s picks. He’s backed people primarying moderate House Republicans, like gun-rights YouTuber Brandon Herrera, who is running against incumbent Republican Tony Gonzales in a runoff. Gonzales has irked large swathes of the GOP base, and was even censured by the Texas GOP “for lack of fidelity to Republican principles and priorities,” but Good is also backing Derrick Evans, a convicted felon who live-streamed himself storming the Capitol on January 6, in his uphill battle against Congresswoman Carol Miller, who most see as a reliable Trump ally.

Good’s anti-incumbent endorsements are also at odds with his opposition to establishment-oriented groups, such as the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, spending money on open House seats. “I have great concerns about us playing in primaries, spending resources that ought to be reserved for the general election,” he said earlier this year, even though he is currently backing Cameron Hamilton over Derrick Anderson in the open-seat race to succeed Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger.

Anderson has been racking up support from local and national Republicans — including the same GOP infrastructure, such as CLF, that Good is hoping will come to his rescue, even though he’s thus far failed to even pay his expected membership dues to the House GOP’s campaign arm. Good’s attempts to bolster the Freedom Caucus’s membership, at the expense of several of his colleagues’ job security, is one of many reasons that Speaker Mike Johnson hasn’t exactly been champing at the bit to bail him out.

Good is wading into other open-seat races, successfully backing Republicans like Brandon Gill, a firebrand in Texas’s 26th District, and backing Elsie Arntzen in the open race to succeed Congressman Matt Rosendale in Montana’s 2nd District. Arntzen in particular is a somewhat off-brand pick, because she and her husband, Steve Arntzen, have a long track record of funding Democrats in Montana.

Good’s primary is another two months away. It will be a fantastic case study into Trumpworld’s ability to oust one of their peskiest intra-party foes and whether Good’s national focus comes at the expense of support in his district.

Calvin Moore, a GOP strategist working to unseat Good in the primary, put his potential quandary memorably: “Homeboy is literally focused on every race EXCEPT his own.”

–Matthew Foldi

First TikTok, now tutoring

Tutor.com, an educational website used by everyone from elementary school teachers to military servicemembers, is under congressional scrutiny for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

The site was purchased in 2022 by Primavera Capital Group, which a coalition of lawmakers noted this week is a “Chinese-owned” firm with “a well-documented relationship with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.”

Thirteen Republican representatives, led by Congressman Tim Walberg, raised concerns in a letter to education secretary Miguel Cardona first obtained by Cockburn that revolve around how Tutor.com collects “sensitive data on its users and tutors, including names, locations, IP addresses and recordings of the tutoring sessions.”

“As has been demonstrated by TikTok and ByteDance, Tutor.com being headquartered in the United States does not protect it from its owner’s requirements or connections to the Chinese Communist Party,” the letter continues.

Walberg told Cockburn that he and his colleagues want Cardona to “thoroughly evaluate the implications of this partnership, particularly in the context of student privacy.”

“Similar to efforts to force TikTok to break up with the CCP, this is not a First Amendment issue. We’re not interested in restricting content but going after the conduct allowed under Chinese law,” Walberg said. “We encourage more educational platforms for children, so long as they are not being used and manipulated to influence our children and collect data on them.”

–Cockburn