Blocked funding for ATF's planned shotgun import ban already paying dividends
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St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner ^ | 25 January, 2012 |
Kurt Hofmann </small>
<small>Posted on
Thursday, January 26, 2012 1:57:33 PM by
marktwain</small>
Last November, the "Fiscal Year 2012 Agriculture, Commerce/Justice/Science and Transportation/Housing/Urban Development Appropriations bills" omnnibus was signed into law. One provision of that law blocks funding for a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) plan to ban the importation of certain shotguns, based on their not being sufficiently suited to "sporting purposes." From AmmoLand.com:
SEC. 541. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the salaries or expenses of personnel to deny, or fail to act on, an application for the importation of any model of shotgun if– (1) all other requirements of law with respect to the proposed importation are met; and (2) no application for the importation of such model of shotgun, in the same configuration, had been denied by the Attorney General prior to January 1, 2011, on the basis that the shotgun was not particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.
We have talked about this insidious BATFE plot before.
Particularly offensive was the BATFE's proposal to not only exploit the heinous "sporting purposes" requirement to justify gun bans, but to simply ignore sports of their choosing:
Further, both studies concluded that the scope of “sporting purposes” did not include all lawful activity, but was limited to traditional sports such as hunting, skeet shooting, and trap shooting.
The obvious motive here was to get around the fact that sports like 3-Gun are built around just the kinds of politically incorrect guns that the BATFE had hoped to ban. National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea puts it this way:
So now the fedgov presumes the power to be the final arbiter of “authorized sports”?
For now, though, the BATFE has been thwarted. This year's SHOT (Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade) show, just wrapped