When the ATF announced its 34-rule reform package on April 29, gun-rights advocates celebrated the largest rollback of regulatory overreach in a generation. The Everytown for Gun Safety crowd responded the way you’d expect: with public meltdown disguised as analysis, accusing the ATF of selling out to the firearms industry.
The most prominent Everytown response came from Greg Lickenbrock, writing for The Smoking Gun — Everytown’s in-house publication — in a piece cataloging the Bloomberg-funded outfit’s grievances with the reform package. Read carefully, the piece accidentally makes the gun-rights case better than most gun-rights advocates could.
Everytown thinks that regulators talking to the regulated industry is somehow scandalous
Lickenbrock’s central complaint is that Cekada signed the rule package surrounded by leaders from the American Suppressor Association, the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the National Association for Gun Rights, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Gun Owners of America. According to Everytown, this is evidence that “the rules are clearly designed to benefit the gun industry.”
A few problems with this framing. First, GOA, NRA, NAGR, and SAF aren’t the gun industry — they’re civil rights organizations representing gun owners. Gun-rights organizations and the firearms industry have historically had plenty of disagreements (anyone remember the Bill Ruger AR-15 magazine capacity comments, or the S&W “Lawsuit Locks” controversy?). Treating them as a monolithic “gun industry” interest reveals that Everytown either doesn’t understand the people they’re attacking or doesn’t care to distinguish.
Second, and more importantly, regulatory agencies are supposed to communicate with the industries and stakeholders they regulate. The Administrative Procedure Act explicitly requires public comment processes for federal rulemaking. Cekada bringing in industry representatives and gun-rights organizations for input isn’t corruption. It’s how rulemaking is supposed to work in a system where the people affected by regulations get a voice in how those regulations are written.
What Everytown is actually objecting to is that the ATF talked to the people the regulations affect, rather than just to Everytown.
The “3.28 million scary buyers” non-argument
Lickenbrock claims one of the “most troubling” proposals would let FFLs ship guns directly to buyers’ doors without requiring an in-person visit to a brick-and-mortar location. He cites the ATF’s own estimate that 3.28 million gun buyers would use this option.
A few facts Lickenbrock doesn’t mention:
- Federal law already requires all gun transfers from FFLs to go through a background check, regardless of whether the transfer happens in-store or via shipping
- The ATF is expanding an existing regulation, not creating a new pathway around background checks
- Twenty-nine states already have concealed-carry permits that exempt holders from additional NICS checks because the background check happened when they obtained the permit
The “scary” 3.28 million figure is just a count of how many Americans the ATF estimates would find this option convenient. None of them would be bypassing the federal background check requirement. They’d just be skipping a trip to the gun store.
That’s not a public safety concern. That’s a convenience improvement for law-abiding citizens that Everytown is trying to dress up as something nefarious.
The Form 4473 “straw purchaser” claim collapses on inspection
Lickenbrock argues the ATF’s proposed Form 4473 changes will make it easier for straw purchasers to slip through by removing questions “used to stop illegal straw purchases.”
What are these critical anti-straw-purchase questions the ATF is dropping? Two main items:
- A requirement for the purchaser to state their biological gender in Part 1, Section A, Question 6
- An expanded explanation of federal marijuana prohibition in Question 11.e
If you think prohibited persons committing felony straw purchases are being stopped by their unwillingness to lie about their gender identity or their reluctance to admit federal marijuana violations, Lickenbrock has an Everytown article to sell you. These aren’t anti-straw-purchase measures. They’re administrative bloat that the ATF is appropriately streamlining.
The actual anti-straw-purchase architecture in federal firearms law — the NICS background check, the federal felony penalties for false statements on Form 4473, the federal felony penalties for purchasing a firearm on behalf of a prohibited person — all remain fully in effect. The reform package addresses paperwork, not enforcement.
The “Charleston Loophole”
Lickenbrock objects to the ATF doubling the time a NICS decision remains valid from 30 to 60 days, claiming this will increase the risk that prohibited persons obtain firearms.
This is the same argument gun-control advocates have been making for years, and it has the same problem it always has: a prohibited person with a firearm is still a prohibited person with a firearm.
If a NICS check is later determined to have been improperly approved, the ATF already has statutory authority to retrieve the firearm. The validity window doesn’t change what’s legal — it changes how long the paperwork remains current.
The Charleston shooting in 2015 — the case Lickenbrock implicitly references — happened because of a NICS examiner error in the existing system, not because of any validity window issue.
The shooter took possession of his firearm 67 days after the NICS check, well past the existing 30-day window, because his FFL exercised the legal default-proceed option after the 72-hour examination period expired without a determination. That’s a different problem than the validity window Lickenbrock is complaining about.
The 2019 Henry Pratt Company shooting in Aurora, Illinois — another mass shooting Everytown might want to remember — happened because the Illinois State Police failed to follow up on a revoked Firearm Owner’s Identification card. The shooter purchased the gun legally before his FOID was revoked, and the state police never verified that he’d surrendered the firearm after revocation. That’s a state-level enforcement failure, not a federal NICS validity window issue.
In other words, the two mass shootings most commonly cited in arguments for restricting NICS were not caused by the federal regulatory framework that the ATF is now reforming.