Gun Owners of America Aghast at Potential ATF Expansion

A national gun rights organization has condemned the expansion of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in President Joe Biden’s $6.8 Trillion budget proposal for 2024.

“GOA is extremely concerned at the massive surge in ATF funding in recent years—doubling the size of the agency since the end of the Obama administration,” Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs, Aidan Johnston, sent an email to The Epoch Times.

Biden’s budget proposal for the ATF includes $1.9 million. This represents an 13.6 percent increase on 2022, and half a million dollars more than the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget.

If passed as written, Biden’s budget would expand the ATF by 35.7 percent—an overall growth of more than 50 percent since the Obama administration.

Biden’s plan states that the $1.9billion would be used to expand multi-jurisdictional firearm trafficking strike forces, improve firearms industry regulation, as well as implement the Bipartisan Safety and Community Act.

The FBI will also be required to spend $51 million on the implementation of the Act’s enhanced background check system.

GOA released a statement stating that the budget items were nothing more than incremental gun controls. This will make no gun owner safer and deny constitutional rights to law-abiding gun owners.

This organization is particularly concerned about funding for “crisis intervention programs,” so-called “Red Flag Laws.”

GOA and other gun rights organizations claim that Red Flag laws allow authorities to seize firearms without due process. They argue that the Act’s requirement for due process language is misleading.

The Act demands due process “at the appropriate phase” This is the process used to prevent a person from violating their constitutional rights.

The group points out that the law does not specify the time of the phase, so it is possible that the appropriate phase could occur after firearms have been confiscated.

“GOA analyzed the Biden administration’s disbursal of ‘Red Flag’ gun confiscation grants pursuant to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and found that the ‘due process’ protections … were worthless,” According to the statement of the group.

It also states that the ATF uses a “zero tolerance” policy to create an unconstitutional gun registry. GOA has obtained an internal memo from the ATF informing them how to shut down gun shops that are law-abiding for minor offenses.

‘Funding Should be Restricted’

All sales records of a shop that closes are given to the government when it closes. GOA claims that all the records have been compiled by ATF into a central gun registry. This allows for tracking of firearms used in crimes and their location.

Johnston wrote to The Epoch Times stating that Congress should immediately curb the ATF.

“Funding should be restricted to alcohol, tobacco, explosives, and only violent firearm crimes—meaning the agency should be prohibited from going after peaceful gun owners for non-violent gun control violations,” Johnston wrote.

GOA stated that some protection may be offered by recent U.S. Supreme Court cases.

“Laws restricting the rights of legal adults are rightly beginning to be struck down as unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s ‘text, history, and tradition’ Second Amendment test as affirmed in DC v. Heller and NYSRPA v. Bruen,” This is the statement.

An email to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy was not returned by a spokesperson.