The deadline for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s autopsy on the Second Amendment has come and gone. The order, Protecting Second Amendment Rights, issued on February 7, provided a thirty-day period for the Attorney General to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens, and present a proposed plan of action to the President, through the Domestic Policy Advisor, to protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.”
So, what does this delay mean? Given the historical analysis of the situation, it could mean that the Second Amendment rights of American citizens are not really a priority, at least not as much as the ability to sip a soft drink through a proper plastic straw versus one of those wretched paper abominations. However, it could mean something diametrically opposite if you subscribe to promises and a sense of rejuvenated allegiance to the Bill of Rights from those who have a track record on the matter that isn’t quite stellar.
I’m not telling you to stow your faith. On the contrary, I recognize my cynicism comes from a place of deep-seated disappointment in our leadership and their pattern of treating the Second Amendment like some second-class liberty. That pattern has not only been established by the federal government with disgraced legislation like the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), and the Hughes Amendment in the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA) but it has been upheld in the courts by activist judges and has encouraged lawmakers in states only pretending to be American to increasingly enact authoritarian and unconstitutional regulations on gun rights. Don’t even get me started on the damage allowed to be inflicted upon law-abiding gun owners by the ATF, a regulatory agency whose uniform should rightfully be swapped out for a brownish-colored top.
With that being said, I want to be proven wrong. Rarely in my life have I ever wanted to be wrong so intensely. However, I am far more prone to trusting the historical analysis of behavior patterns than I am to promises of a new leaf. If my pessimism annoys you, good, join the club. It annoys me also, but not as much as the solid foundation that supports it. Believe me when I say I will happily take the stage for a tomato-throwing exhibition if I’m wrong.
If the cycle is broken, however, what could that look like? It is, after all, possible to see the tardiness as a good thing, as if AG Bondi has decided to go through ongoing Second Amendment infringements with a fine-tooth comb, tirelessly dedicated to developing the most clever legal strategy to restore rights unduly withheld from Americans for so long. Perhaps that conspicuously absent first-week national reciprocity promise could be rolled up into this effort as well.
Just yesterday, the Attorney General’s office announced a new working group within the Department of Justice whose task is to analyze many instances of gun rights prohibitions upon individuals to determine if they, in fact, clear Constitutional scrutiny, as in United States v. Rahimi, where the Supreme Court affirmed that an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the safety of another may temporarily be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment, the key word here being temporary.
While I’ll support the effort, I have a nagging feeling that this administration’s duty to the Second Amendment may amount to nothing more than the need to put a stick in the eye of the Biden Administration by rolling back the measures taken by that regime against Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) and possibly putting the brakes on other infringement orders carried out by the ATF. If that is the case, any perceived restoration of Second Amendment rights will hardly be tangible to the average law-abiding gun owner.
American conservatives need to stop celebrating the 2024 election and realize that this is but the beginning of a journey, and if we don’t hold feet to the fire, we are not likely to see any real change when it comes to gun rights. I can hear the arguments now, telling me I’m a single-issue voter. That’s just plain dumb. I write about guns and the Second Amendment, so don’t expect to see articles from me surrounding reproductive rights or men using women’s bathrooms, even though I find the left grossly perverse on those subjects and like to poke fun at them for it fairly often. Remember that if we’re slinging hyperbole, I could respond by suggesting your lack of passion on the subject is indicative of your left-leaning distaste for gun rights. In any event, I suppose we’ll all sit tight for Bondi’s response. I hope it’s worth the wait.
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