Category: General Blog

And likewise, I’m even more disappointed the various 2A groups haven’t pushed for one of the fixes legally available to make this 2A Task Force a great tool for our cause. This is a golden opportunity, which is being wasted… The midterms are coming fast. [More]

Concerns have been raised that a task force, by law, can’t include non-government members. Yes, and no. See the overviews I compiled.

Regular readers will recall that my initial suggestion was not for a task force, but for an Office of Second Amendment Protection to act as a counter to Biden’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention. I was disappointed that earlier Trump administration efforts, from the 2016 Second Amendment Coalition, co-chaired by Don Jr., and 2020’s Gun Owners for Trump, though promising to act as advisory panels (which can trigger Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) rules), they panned out to be voter election inducements that made no further announcements of agendas and progress made.

The Democrats did it differently. From March for Our Lives:

After four years of concerted pressure and advocacy from March For Our Lives youth activists, President Biden established the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in September 2023…Led by our friends and fellow activists Greg Jackson, formerly the Executive Director of Community Action Justice Fund, Stefanie Feldman, and Rob Wilcox, and overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris, the office has already hit the ground running.

I added the links to the quote to show who these people are. Committed anti-gunners and Democrat apparatchiks all, with ties and loyalties to prohibitionist organizations, Biden appointed them, making them, in effect, government “workers.”

There is no reason the Trump administration could not have followed precedent.

Then there is the option of creating a FACA-compliant advisory committee to include a non-government panel of experts. True, it would have had to create public records and allow comments from all sides, but so does rule making, and in the end, the administration makes the rules. And as gun owners, we should WANT to know what the committee is up to and what is being presented to it so that we could provide the arguments needed. And they could solicit input from individual consultations with non-government experts. And those individuals could get plenty of input from gun owners.

The President and AG Bondi could have also opted to simply meet with Second Amendment advocates and other special interest groups to understand their positions, gather information, and build support for their policy agendas.

There are ways to do this. Keeping things close to the vest may have the benefit of secrecy until they’re ready to make a move, but it also has produced, on more than one occasion, bipolar moves that one day make gun owners manic with enthusiasm, and on the next depressed that DOJ lawyers or ATF functionaries could do something so contrary to the promises AG Bondi made in her April 8 all-hands memorandum pledging the DOJ to “use its full might to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Related UPDATE

The groups could get around restrictions altogether by going private.