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Mossberg 185D Demonstration
Opinion
News Flash. The Montana Shooting Sports Association successfully pushed a bill in 1993 that I wrote to give Montana permit reciprocity. That Montana law was improved in 1995 with another bill I wrote. Because of that success, Montana recognizes all other state permits, and Montana permits are honored by 34 other states. Plus, Montana is now permitless for both open and concealed carry, so we even let people from New York and California carry here.
Thirty years later, the NRA comes along with its own bill claiming to create reciprocity for Montana. What’s up with that?
The NRA solicited introduction of HB 674, a bill intended to create an “enhanced concealed weapon permit” here. This bill is alleged to gain recognition of the new “enhanced” Montana permits by five more states. If the NRA had bothered to ask us about this D.C.-centric idea, we’d have told them it is not suitable for Montana and that the bill, as drafted, was seriously flawed, but they didn’t bother to ask. For lack of local knowledge, the bill the NRA introduced had to have a dozen amendments applied to it to fix the drafting errors and make it more compliant with existing Montana law.
But, that heavy fix didn’t complete the repair of the bill.
The five states with which the NRA bill would allegedly get Montana reciprocity all currently disallow Montana permits because they don’t recognize permits of states that issue to persons under 21 years old. Current permits in Montana are issued to qualified applicants who are 18. The touted NRA bill would limit the new “enhanced” permit, after jumping through many more qualifying hoops than existing Montana permits, only to people 21 years and older. That’s a fatal and unrepaired flaw in the NRA bill. Why?
Because the Montana Constitution declares that persons 18 years old are adults and must be allowed all privileges of adulthood.
That section of the Montana Constitution had to be amended to allow the Legislature to restrict possession of alcohol to persons 21 years and older, and again to allow the Legislature to restrict marijuana to persons 21 and older. Without another constitutional change, the NRA bill allowing their “enhanced” permits only for people 21 and older will simply not pass constitutional muster in Montana. In that case, even if the bill passes with a constitutionally-correct age of 18, it will not allow Montanans to use these new “enhanced” permits in the five states alleged to be the reason for the bill.
What a mess! And this mess is because the NRA is so desperate for relevance that it chose to wing this effort without talking to knowledgeable people in Montana about the idea and effort.
Meanwhile, the NRA refuses to acknowledge or support the pro-gun bills MSSA has working through the Legislature. This includes a bill to remove an 1884 Jim Crow provision in our RKBA that says the RKBA doesn’t apply to concealed weapons. This includes our bill to pay court costs for a defender who is prosecuted, pleads self-defense, and is acquitted. It includes our bill to prohibit discrimination because of firearms. It includes our bill to pay court costs and attorney fees if a person wins a suit against a government entity to secure the person’s RKBA.
The NRA is withholding support for all of these good MSSA bills while pushing its seriously flawed “enhanced” permit bill that won’t accomplish its alleged objective because it is constitutionally impermissible in Montana.
Since the 1980s, Montana Shooting Sports Association has gotten 70 pro-gun bills through the Montana Legislature and enacted them into law. None of these were initiated or written by the NRA, although the NRA did support a few of them. Maybe the NRA, in its quest for contemporary relevance, is jealous of MSSA’s record of success and seeks to show what a gorilla it is. If so, it misses its target by a wide margin with its ill-conceived HB 674 in Montana.
Gary Marbut is president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, the primary political advocate for Montana gun owners. Marbut has served on the Board of Directors of Gun Owners of America and has twice been the recipient of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Grass Roots Activist of the Year award.
A person holds a gun in a file image. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The federal government has been using Americans’ income and gun purchases to conduct warrantless tracking and deny Second Amendment rights. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gave salary estimates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the reason to have people’s firearms purchases monitored.
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), told The Epoch Times that the ATF’s activities “monitoring innocent people” is a serious problem. “Congress needs to rein in this rogue agency by either exercising oversight over it or abolishing the unconstitutional agency altogether,” said Pratt.
These revelations come from new documents, viewed by The Epoch Times which it received from its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The latest production from the FOIA has hundreds of pages—many redacted—showing ATF agents requesting warrantless surveillance by the FBI for lawful reasons such as low salaries, past firearm purchases, and sending “bizarre” messages.
The Epoch Times exclusively reported in January about the FBI’s secret monitoring service that tracks people by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for gun purchases for mere “potential violations of law.”
Too Poor to Buy Guns
According to the documents, a man in Arizona was put into the NICS’s daily monitoring because he has a “reported income” of only $2,839. The ATF agent wrote, “In my experience, someone with this amount of income would not be able to afford 20 firearms.”
An Asian man in Texas was put on the manual background check because the ATF said he has “no work history” which “could possibly indicate” that he is “straw purchasing.”
A special agent in Kansas emailed ATF’s liaison at the NICS to flag two purchasers for “potential trafficking.” The agent wrote: “My targets are purchasing an abundance of firearms without a license or known financial means to obtain the product.”
The FBI’s NICS expert instructed the agent in Kansas on what to include to ensure approval for tracking the suspects. “I would suggest covering the lack of income versus expenditures and also if there is substantial make/model duplication,” wrote the FBI. The ATF agent emailed back with the incomes for each man, acquired by the Kansas Department of Labor.
All the cases in the documents are related to the ATF investigating dealing firearms without a license and straw purchasing, which is buying guns for people prohibited from owning a firearm.
Tracking Income
Gun rights activists say federal law enforcement is missing the mark.
“The poor usually live in areas with the most crime and thus have a strong need to arm themselves heavily,” Pratt said. “So targeting the indigent is simply another avenue for gun grabbers to implement a backdoor gun ban.”
ATF headquarters will not disclose how it acquired the other suspects’ incomes, employment information, and past gun purchases found in the FOIA forms.
“We are unable to discuss specific techniques utilized in criminal investigations,” ATF spokesman Erik Longnecker told The Epoch Times. “ATF utilizes a multitude of legal means in our criminal investigations to protect our communities from violent gun crime.”
Longnecker referred The Epoch Times to the National Tracing Center website for information about “several overt programs such as multiple sales and demand letters that can be helpful in identifying illegal firearms trafficking.”
Buying Too Many Guns
A black man in Florida was monitored daily by the FBI for at least 90 days in 2020 because an ATF agent wrote: “Based on my training and experience, I have not seen a legal firearms purchaser purchase approximately 30 firearms in a 120-day window for their personal collection.”
Licensed firearms dealers must report to ATF the sale of two or more handguns to the same purchaser within five consecutive business days. However, there is no federal law limiting the number of guns a person can buy.
“Some agent just decided that is enough Second Amendment for you this year,” Robert Olson, the attorney who filed the FOIA lawsuit for the GOA, told The Epoch Times.
Buying and Selling Guns
A Wisconsin man was put under surveillance in 2020 because an ATF agent saw text messages related to buying and selling guns and suspected dealing without a license. The agent said the man bought guns from the website Gunbroker.com, transferred them through a local gun store, and then resold the firearms “using email, text messaging, and the website Armslist.com.”
There is more redacted black markings than visible information on this form, but it does not disclose the number of guns the suspect bought and sold.
The ATF has an online guide that explains: “If you only make occasional sales of firearms from your personal collection, you do not need to be licensed.” It also says you “will need a license if you repetitively buy and sell firearms with the principal motive of making a profit.”
Too Many Gun Parts
In the secret documents, an ATF agent asked the FBI to flag a man in Arizona suspected of dealing parts of guns. “In my experience, it is common for people to purchase large number of AR-15 style lower receivers, build them into rifles, and sell the rifles for profit,” the agent wrote to get the suspect put into NICS.
A “lower receiver” is the base part of an AR-style rifle which has a serial number on it. It cannot fire without a barrel, trigger, and other parts put on it.
“It is common for people to buy several lower receivers and build them into finished guns. If it’s your hobby, that is not sufficient to prove you are illegally dealing firearms,” said attorney Olson. “How does the agent distinguish between the Second Amendment enthusiast and the criminals?”
‘Bizarre’ Messages
A Missouri man was put into NICS after an ATF agent emailed that a “U.S. Attorney’s Office asked that we monitor his activity due to recent threats and bizarre messages he has been leaving.”
The agent wrote that the man “was recently released from BOP [Bureau of Prisons] and has begun making threats toward the U.S. Attorney’s Office, federal judge, and ATF case agent.” The completed form does not indicate the man has committed a felony, which would mean he would be in the NICS and prevented from buying a gun at the point of sale.
“Sending bizarre messages is not something that makes you lose your Second Amendment rights,” said Olson. “He sounds like a bad guy, but it’s not connected to firearms. That’s a huge misuse of the background check process.”
Anonymous Tips
The ATF’s law enforcement role is to investigate when a prohibited person completes a 4473 gun background check, and the NICS denies the purchase. In one case in the files, the ATF appears to have a woman tracked before the investigation has been done and based on an anonymous tip.
Documents show a Hispanic woman in Texas was put into the NICS because an agent got an “iTip provided by an anonymous person” who related that she had “purchased 10 firearms in the last two weeks.”
The agent wrote that the investigation was incomplete because it did not have the background check forms from the dealer (“4473s”) nor video footage from the store.
ATF and FBI Unbowed
There are no instances of the FBI denying any ATF request to put a person under warrantless surveillance in all the documents released so far. Moreover, there are no documents showing the monitoring periods ended. As we previously reported, the FBI told the ATF that it will renew the NICS flags of 30 to 120 days and limitless times if requested.
“It’s time for Congress to repeal the NICS check. Given that more than 95 percent of the initial stops are for mistaken identity, it is clear that NICS is not keeping guns out of criminals’ hands,” GOA’s Pratt said.
The ATF spokesman declined to say if this monitoring program with the FBI was ongoing. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
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