Biden administration revokes most gun dealer licenses in history

The Biden administration has revoked a record number of licenses from gun dealerships this fiscal year as it intensifies its crackdown on firearms.  

According to a Wall Street Journal report this month, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revoked 122 licenses from gun dealerships this year, up from 90 last year and only 27 in 2021. Since 2013—the earliest year of record—the most licenses ever revoked in a single year was 81.

“We’ve taken steps to hold accountable those few dealers who are engaging in these willful violations,” said ATF Director Steve Dettelbach. “They’re not going to have the privilege of being a gun dealer anymore.” 

Gun dealers have historically served as valuable sources of information for the federal government, with former ATF Deputy Assistant Director Peter Forcelli calling gun dealers the agency’s “first line of defense against gun trafficking.” 

“Why are we now beating an ally into submission?” Forcelli commented on the ATF’s crackdown.

Former gun dealer Anthony Navarro lost his license last year allegedly due to paperwork errors after receiving three earlier warnings since 2009.

“We were making $1 million a year, now it’s less than $100,000,” said Navarro. “This policy is designed to be a backdoor violation of the Second Amendment.” 

But even gun dealers who reportedly have their papers in order may not be safe from the Biden administration’s clampdown on firearms.

In June twenty heavily armed agents from the ATF and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) raided gun dealership Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana, seizing all buyer information records known as Form 4473s.

“A spokeswoman for the IRS would only say they were there on official IRS business,” reported KMON Radio. “The ATF says it was providing assistance to the IRS. We attempted to enter the store today and were stopped by agents at the door who would only say that the gun store is closed and will reopen tomorrow,” the news outlet added.

Shop owner Tom Van Hoose said he is “known for meticulous adherence to laws and regulations” but has nevertheless been under scrutiny for the last two years from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and now the Internal Revenue Service. 

Van Hoose, who sells assault weapons such as AR-15s, believes the scrutiny is politically motivated, according to Truth Press.

Indeed, documents obtained by gun rights organization Gun Owners of America (GOA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show the ATF has been working with the FBI to monitor law-abiding Americans for gun purchases without obtaining a warrant.

The general process usually begins with the ATF requesting that the FBI begins tracking a certain citizen's gun purchases. The FBI then places that individual in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which covertly monitors the individual. An analysis by The Epoch Times reveals that the ATF appears to target minorities. 

Justifications for these surveillance requests are many times innocuous, such as low-income status. In Arizona, for example, a man who had a reported income of $2,839 was registered in the NICS because he shouldn’t have been able to afford several guns.

“In my experience, someone with this amount of income would not be able to afford 20 firearms,” one ATF agent wrote.

Similarly, a Texas man was subjected to a manual background check because he had no reported work history.

One FBI agent wrote to an ATF liaison that his “targets” were “purchasing an abundance of firearms without a license or known financial means to obtain the product.” 

In 2020 a black man in Florida was monitored every day for four months because, as the agent wrote, “Based on my training and experience, I have not seen a legal firearms purchaser purchase approximately 30 firearms in a 120-day window for their personal collection.”

The NICS system is only supposed to be used to prevent those who are prohibited from purchasing firearms from doing so.

Other documents obtained by the GOA show that the federal government forced people to declare themselves incompetent — and therefore prohibited from purchasing a gun — so that they can be registered in the NICS system. The Washington Examiner reports that between 2011 and 2019 the FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement coordinated to force at least 60 people to declare themselves a “danger” to themselves and/or others or “lacking the mental capacity” needed to own a firearm.