Hillary Clinton is promising not to uphold or to reinterpret existing gun laws but to alter them, and thus to achieve by fiat what she cannot achieve by legislation.
My little corner of the political Internet is abuzz and aflutter today with the rather alarming news that the Democrats’ presidential front-runner, one Hillary Rodham Clinton, hopes to impose gun control by “executive order” if she wins. Here she is, in her own words, conceding as much for posterity: Tighten the gun-show and Internet-sales loophole [sic] if Congress won’t.
If Congress refuses to act, Clinton will take administrative action to require that any person attempting to sell a significant number of guns be deemed “in the business” of selling firearms. This would ensure that high-volume gun sellers are covered by the same common-sense rules that apply to gun stores — including requiring background checks on gun sales.
A little background, before we go any further: Under contemporary federal law, the executive branch enjoys a good amount of discretion in determining who is subject to the rules that govern commercial transactions and who is not. Presently, this task falls to the ATF, which is empowered to distinguish between those who sell firearms “with the
principal objective of livelihood and profit” — or, put another way, for whom “the intent underlying the sale or disposition of firearms is predominantly one of obtaining livelihood and pecuniary gain” — and those who sell guns privately in the pursuit of “improving or liquidating a personal firearms collection.”
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