by Bob Barr | Feb 8, 2021 | Uncategorized |
FullMAGnews What the Biden Administration has planned for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is anyone’s guess, other than the certainty the agency’s regulatory power will continue to be used to go after legally owned firearms and ammunition. In fact, ATF already is on the move. An official request for public comment by ATF just last December provides a road sign as to where the regulatory agency is likely to start now that it is under the command of a gun-control president. Even though pressure from House Republicans forced the ATF to withdraw its public notice at the time, it very clearly outlines the agency’s intent to reexamine the legal status of pistols that use “stabilizing braces.” Stabilizing braces are a common feature for increasingly popular AR-style pistols that were approved by ATF nearly a decade ago. Manufacturers of the pistol accessory declared to ATF in 2012 that such devices served to facilitate one-handed shooting of pistols — an important feature for individuals unable to do so because of disabilities or other physically limiting factors. However, in what has become a preferred modus operandi for the agency’s decision-making, it has changed its mind, claiming that the popularity of AR and AK-type pistols featuring these braces suggests the accessory no longer is being used in the “spirit” for which its original approval was sought.If, as expected, the ATF returns to the issue now that Joe Biden occupies the White House, individuals who currently own the estimated three to four million of these pistols already deemed “lawful” by the government, would be forced to register the firearms as “short-barrel rifles” subject to registry and taxation under the National...
by Bob Barr | Feb 3, 2021 | Townhall Article |
TownhallOnce upon a time, stock trading served as a way for businesses to raise capital and for traders to make investments. If companies flourished, stocks rose and investors made money; if not, stocks fell and investors lost money. This was the way the stock market was intended to function. Over time, however, more and more rules and regulations were added, each to address something that at the time was thought necessary to prevent cheating and manipulation. Just like the proverbial “Road to Hell,” Wall Street became paved with regulatory good intentions. Instead of eradicating cheating, manipulation, and fraud every new “rule” or “failsafe” implemented by Congress or government regulators simply created new ways for inside players to game the system. Thus, an event like the “GameStop” phenomenon last week — where the coordinated efforts of a social network group (Reddit’s “WallStreetBets”) drove up the price of GameStop’s stock, thereby costing short-sellers tens of billions of dollars — is both unsurprising and was entirely predictable. The only surprising element was that the new kids on the block (retail investors) quickly turned the tables on the supposed Grand Masters. “Short selling” occurs when an investor borrows stock from a company and immediately sells it, hoping when it is time to buy stock in which to return to the company, the price has gone down resulting in profit for the investor. On the other side, a “short squeeze,” which is what the Reddit group of retail investors instigated last week, involves buying-up stock to drive the price higher, forcing short sellers to abandon their position before taking a potentially astronomical loss. Normally this too...
by Bob Barr | Feb 1, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller If there was any doubt that Jan. 20 signaled the rebirth of the nanny state, the slew of executive actions signed by President Joe Biden on his first days in the Oval Office confirmed that it has returned with a vengeance.In addition to revealing his long love affair with regulatory power, Biden made clear that virtually any actions undertaken by his predecessor were ipso facto bad to the bone and must be revoked, rescinded and condemned.Take, for example, Executive Order No. 13992, signed the afternoon of Jan. 20 and titled, “Executive Order on Revocation of Certain Executive Orders Concerning Federal Regulation.” The document is a paean to the regulatory behemoth that has grown to immense proportions in Washington, D.C., in recent decades.E.O. 13992 does not even try to disguise its preference for “regulatory tools” to undo the “harmful policies and directives” of the previous quadrennium, especially former President Donald Trump’s failure to enact “racial justice” or address “climate change.” This particular executive order, the eighth in Biden’s opening salvo, criticizes by name a series of actions undertaken by Trump that tried in some manner to lessen the regulatory burdens on American businesses and the corresponding cost to taxpayers. Trump’s Jan. 30, 2017 order, “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs,” for example, was rendered dead and buried by the stroke of Biden’s pen.Another of Biden’s Inauguration Day presidential missives, E.O. 13990, has been widely cited for elevating to existential status the “Climate Crisis.” Its nine pages of climate change hyperbole, however, also contain statements reflecting and reinforcing the new president’s disdain for anything that might hint at regulatory “reform.” Every regulatory action...
by Bob Barr | Jan 28, 2021 | Uncategorized |
FullMAGnewsSecond Amendment supporters should take no comfort in the fact that President Biden issued no executive orders restricting firearms or ammunition during his first week in the Oval Office. The new Commander in Chief remains a clear and present danger to our Second Amendment rights, and with Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, it is only a question of when and how boldly he will move his gun control agenda forward, not if he will do so. Even by most Democrat Party standards, many of the Biden campaign’s gun control proposals were extreme. The former vice president is too sly and too experienced from his long tenure in the Senate to believe he will succeed in quickly accomplishing every item on that wish list. But, by having set the bar so high with his campaign’s radical gun control agenda, now as President he can make his Administration appear magnanimous and willing to “compromise” with the GOP by adopting the agenda bit by bit (a façade that always appeals to “moderate” Republicans).To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “there may be method to his madness.”The start of any real action on guns almost certainly will take place within the regulatory environment, which is where Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama, found the most fertile soil for gun control. Here, the Biden Administration can work mostly in the shadows under the cloak of regulatory interpretation and rulemaking, largely hidden from the media and without attention-drawing hearings and floor votes. Rather than having to squabble with Republicans and moderate Democrats, like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, Biden would be dealing with career bureaucrats who share his...
by Bob Barr | Jan 27, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Imagine how much more difficult it would have been for America’s Apollo moon landing program to have succeeded as it did so spectacularly in 1969 had NASA scientists been subject to being fired for failing to use the correct pronouns when referring to their colleagues. Worse, consider if in the early 1950s as the world faced the scourge of polio, how many children’s lives would have been lost, if funding for Jonas Salk’s miracle polio vaccine research had been cut because the board of directors for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis lacked sufficient “diversity.” America and the world would look far different today if “woke” politics were then as they are now.Whereas once America’s exceptionalism could literally take us to the moon and back, today, half a century later, government cannot make even the most basic of decisions without coursing through a long list of regulatory and policy self-checks to ensure its actions will not be perceived as racist, sexist, jingoist, or in any way “triggering” to an individual or collective “victim” somewhere. The disease of 21st century “wokeness” has become not only embarrassing, but crippling. Just ask our neighbor to the North, which has seen the Keystone XL Pipeline project stopped dead in its tracks, after millions already had been spent to construct it, solely because the new Biden Administration is beholden to the woke Green Crazies now in control of the Democrat Party.If you are wondering how the country that once sent Hitler running to a Berlin bunker to die like a coward is now paralyzed to take decisive action against a worldwide pandemic because it does not...
