OSD 299: What a president can do
There’s a thing that gun-friendly presidents do when they get into office: nothing.
This observation is mostly driven by the fact that America has never had a pro-gun-rights president. Many of them have said they value gun rights, but once they’re in the chair, zero out of the 45 people to hold the office have done anything significant to protect gun rights. The first 31 guys didn’t need to do anything, since there were no federal gun laws to speak of. There were such laws starting with FDR, and since then presidents have either ratcheted them tighter or done nothing.
That raises the question of what the president can do. Last week we mentioned this excerpt from:
A while ago, we sent some thoughts to the current presidential administration answering the question, “What can we singlehandedly deliver for gun rights?” Here’s the list we sent them:
Redefine “armor-piercing ammo” to re-allow previously banned ammo types
Redefine 922(r) out of existence
Repeal Bush 41’s assault weapon import ban
Bring back kitchen table FFLs, and make a new internet-sales FFL (this is in the 2017 ATF white paper)
Repeal the photos and fingerprints parts of ATF Rule 41F (an Obama-era rule change), so that trusts don’t need photos and fingerprints for their members. (Careful here: Rule 41F also changed “you need CLEO approval” to “you just need to notify your CLEO, but they can’t stop you” — that was a very important positive change that we should keep.)
Expansive allowance for pistol braces. Basically make it official that anything goes.
Grant a blanket “lawful purposes” exemption for gun possession to all people in the country on nonimmigrant visas (tourists, H1Bs, etc.)
Machine gun amnesty (Forgotten Weapons’s explanation)
Presumptive approvals for Form 1s and Form 4s. They approve it right away, and then can claw it back 10 months later or whatever if you get denied. Precedent: this is how NICS checks already work — if you don’t get a yes/no within 3 days, you can take the gun home and then they just claw it back if you eventually get rejected.
C&R firearms are defined as any gun more than 50 years old, or any gun that the ATF deems to be a C&R. They could add a massive influx of modern guns to the C&R list. Basically all the cool ‘70s–‘90s guns. There’s no reason the Steyr AUG and MP5 and FAL and the like shouldn’t be considered classics. Hell, AKs too.
What we didn’t mention is that around the same time in 2020, we wrote those ideas, and some others, into a doc that we and FPC worked on together. We passed that doc to the White House. Nothing happened after that, but you can read the doc here (PDF).
So the president can do quite a bit. There are also things the president can’t do without Congress. Those include repealing the NFA and forcing interstate concealed carry reciprocity.
It’s ironic that gun rights are about decentralized power while being subject to the whims of the world’s largest centralized power. It might be better for gun rights to have one president instead of another, but the ideal world for gun rights is where it doesn’t matter who the president is.
We don’t live in that world yet … but in a way we kind of do. It would be an exaggeration to say that the president doesn’t matter for gun rights. Supreme Court appointments would be the obvious counter. But remember how this piece started: empirically, no president has taken an executive action to meaningfully strengthen gun rights. So it’s not that presidents doesn’t matter in principle, it’s that in practice, they pretty much haven’t. Nominally pro-gun and anti-gun presidents have come and gone, they’ve done pretty similar things, and gun rights are now ascendant anyway.
If the incoming administration enacts our wishlist, that would be great. But if they don’t, gun rights will keep expanding anyway. Culture is upstream of politics and technology is upstream of culture. If we get the tech and the culture right, the politics won’t matter.
This week’s links
“Lessons Learned at the Worst Firearms Training Class I’ve Ever Attended”
Most posts like this are just a list of complaints. But this one is well-written and genuinely useful as a guide for how (not) to run a training class.
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Wrong! There is one very important thing he can do that will make a huge difference. He needs to appoint pro 2A judges.