Biden’s vilification of gun retailers is out of step with reality
Hudson Crozier
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“Twenty heavily armed” IRS agents arrived at a Montana gun store on Wednesday, according to its owner, Tom Van Hoose. The agents held him up for almost the entire business day to obtain specific records on his customers’ firearm purchases.
The move drew criticism from Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), who both see a “pattern” of the Biden administration choosing to “harass” gun salesmen.
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Indeed, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have targeted legal gun sales as a driving force of gun violence in their rhetoric, even seeking to end liability protections for manufacturers who legally sell a gun that ends up being used for a crime. “Imagine if the tobacco industry had been immune from being sued,” Biden remarked last year, equating an item that can be used for positive ends to an inherently harmful substance.
Biden’s focus on gun shops ignores what years’ worth of data and a recent report from his own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tell us. Most who commit gun-related crimes obtain their weapons illegally in some way. Illegal guns, the ATF notes, are becoming increasingly difficult to track.
Over the weekend, police arrested convicted felons for shooting innocent people in states with loose and strict gun laws alike. A liquor store owner and a 16-year-old, who wasn’t old enough to legally carry, both died in a shootout this month in California, one of the most gun-hating states in the country.
Instead of catching whoever wrongfully gave guns to those people, bureaucrats are ambushing gun retailers who aren’t suspected of any wrongdoing with surprise audits. Hoose even said that, under Biden, his store had already been investigated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration before the IRS came knocking.
Why haven’t we heard any outrage from Biden over the mentally ill felon who stole a gun and fatally shot a pregnant woman and her unborn child in Seattle? He has promised to help local law enforcement better enforce gun laws in their communities, but why not help officials in crime-ridden areas enforce laws in general?
The reason these all-too-common tragedies don’t receive attention from Biden is because they don’t qualify as “mass shootings” with all the typical earmarks that compel media attention and a dramatic presidential speech. Likewise, his bizarrely selective, politically motivated strategy against gun violence is to wage war on retailers whose weapons are used in a fraction of gun crimes, according to the federal government’s own data.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.