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Amy Swearer drops truth bomb during House hearing

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The House held hearings on the ATF on Thursday. The headlines would have been just about that, but Manuel Oliver and his wife, Patricia, had to go and make it about themselves.

But the Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer also spoke during the hearing.

During her testimony, she basically lays down the harsh truth about just what the ATF is and how it acts.

Prior to the disturbance, Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow with The Heritage foundation, was one of four witnesses testifying on March 23 before a joint hearing of subcommittees of the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability titled “ATF’s Assault on the Second Amendment: When is Enough Enough?”.

She agreed with ATF supporters that the agency does important work, but added that it also has a history of questionable actions.

“At its best, ATF and its agents play an integral role in combating gun crime,” Amy Swearer a senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation wrote in her submitted testimony. “At its worst, it acts as a fifth column for gun control advocacy groups.”

Boom.

If Swearer had pulled the microphone off the table and dropped it, it would have been completely appropriate.

After all, she’s right.

Look, the ATF is in charge of enforcing gun regulations in this country, but while there’s always going to be some degree of tension between them and gun owners, that could be kept to a minimum. However, we’ve seen the ATF lately do nothing but advance the gun control narrative and overstep its authority in enforcement.

And that was before the pistol brace ban.

The reason there’s outright hostility between the gun community and the ATF? Because we cannot trust them to act impartially. They act as if they’re the proverbial jack-booted thugs answering to groups like Everytown and Brady, not the American people, and that’s a problem.

And Swearer called them out by saying they’re acting like a fifth column because they are.

Of course, she says they’re that at their worst, but if you take a look around, that’s where we’re standing right here and now.

Swearer is also right that the ATF serves an important function. I know a lot of us don’t like to think about it, but they are supposed to investigate things like the illegal gun trade.

In fact, if that’s where they focused their attention, few would have an issue with them. The problem is that we don’t see much action on that front, just their attempts to jam up innocent gun store owners over things like paperwork errors and trying to intimidate law-abiding citizens who bought guns a little too close together for an agent’s personal comfort.

These aren’t illegal gun trades. This isn’t someone selling stolen guns out of the back of their car to any gangbanger with the cash. Those guys are seemingly ignored by the ATF, which is why Swearer’s comment about a fifth column for gun control resonates with so many of us.

She called them like she saw it, and I, for one, agree completely.

Oversight Committee hearing on ATF disrupted by anti-gun activists

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The House Oversight Committee’s hearing on ATF abuses went off the rails on Thursday as anti-gun activists disrupted the proceedings, causing Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs chairman Rep. Pat Fallon to call for five-minute recess as the Capitol Police removed the protesters.

It was impossible to hear what exactly the activists were yelling about while listening to the live stream of the joint subcommittee hearing by the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs and the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Chairman, but Fallon first tried to get Capitol Police officers to step in and remove gun control activists Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin was murdered in the Parkland shootings in 2018, before he eventually gaveled the hearing in recess for five minutes after Manuel Oliver apparently attempted to regain entry to the hearing room.

“You took my son away from me,” Oliver’s wife, Patricia Oliver, said while Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, addressed the committee.

Fallon ordered them to be removed due to being disruptive, after which Oliver shouted something at Fallon.

As Manuel Oliver and his wife, Patricia Oliver, were removed, Manuel Oliver then was detained by police.

ABC News reporter Will Steakin captured video of Oliver’s arrest.

When the hearing resumed a short time later Fallon chided his Democratic colleagues for applauding the Olivers’ disruption before turning back to question the panel of witnesses on the ATF’s overreach in issuing new rules on unfinished frames and receivers and pistol stabilizing braces.

SB Tactical’s Alex Bosco testified to the ATF’s sudden reversal on a decade’s worth of rule making that attaching a stabilizing brace to a pistol “would not alter” the classification of a pistol or other firearm, and told lawmakers that the agency’s new rule puts millions of gun owners at risk of becoming felons if they don’t register their brace-equipped pistols under the National Firearms Act by the ATF’s May deadline.

Boscot said that while he has no issue with the ATF properly exercising its statutory authority, that’s not what’s happening here. Instead, as he argued, the agency is creating new law complete with a potential ten-year prison sentence for non-compliance; a power that is rightfully reserved to Congress.

It wasn’t just the ATF’s rules on “ghost guns” and stabilizing braces that were scrutinized in today’s hearing. Attorney Matthew Larosiere shared personal testimony about how the ATF’s rulemaking has left “lives shattered” and jobs lost because the ATF used minor and accidental paperwork errors to revoke their federal firearms license.

The Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer also testified about the ATF’s abuse of its authority, and pushed back on “mansplaining” by Swalwell and others that gun control is somehow pro-woman.

Democrats, meanwhile, largely stuck to their talking points that there’s nothing wrong with the ATF’s new rules (despite what the federal courts have said to the contrary) while wallowing in their own ignorance around firearms, with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas declaring that stabilizing braces turn “everyday firearms into killing machines.” Who knew it was the stabilizing brace that turned a gun into a deadly weapon? Does Jackson Lee think that “every day firearms” aren’t capable of lethal force?

Democrats like Lee and Swalwell also accused Republicans of being intent on defunding the ATF and other federal law enforcement agencies; an attempt blunt the Democrats’s embrace of “defund the police” over the past few years and to claim that it’s really Republicans who want to take away funding from public safety budgets. Larosiere was criticized by Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, for instance, for a tweet he sent out in response to the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of several Memphis police officers that said “F*ck police” , though Krishnamoorthi and his colleagues like Eric Swalwell chose not to question Everytown Senior Director of Policy Rob Wilcox about the group’s 2021 declaration that “police violence is gun violence” and demanding “fundamental changes to a racist system that perpetuates police violence against Black people.”

The “Republicans want to defund the police” narrative is coming from the White House as well as Democrats on Capitol Hill, as Axios reported on Thursday morning.

The White House plans to claim the recently released House Freedom Caucus budget plan would “make communities less safe” by cutting funding for 11,000 FBI personnel, freezing hiring at the ATF and otherwise slashing money for law enforcement positions and related grants.

  • Some GOP hardliners have been vocal about their desire to slash funding to agencies they view as weaponized against conservatives. Rep. Matt Gaetz has even suggested abolishing several federal agencies, including the FBI and ATF.
  • “These same House Republicans who opposed the President’s bipartisan reforms and are now threatening to defund or abolish law enforcement agencies,” Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight, said in a statement first shared with Axios.

What were we told when Democrats were calling for defunding the police back in 2020 and 2021? It shouldn’t be taken literally, right? It was more of a call to action to “reimagine policing” in order to curb abuses by law enforcement agencies. Maybe that’s how the left should view the House Freedom Caucus’s budget plans; as a re-imagining of the ATF as an agency that sticks to its congressionally-mandated powers without crafting new gun control laws under the guise of rules and regulations.

There was one notable absence from today’s hearing on ATF abuses; the ATF itself. Director Steve Dettelbach wasn’t in attendance, nor was any other representative from the agency available to answer lawmakers questions. Everytown’s Wilcox ended up serving as the de-facto spokesperson and defender of the ATF, but it would have been good to hear from Dettelbach himself about the agency’s license revocations for minor paperwork errors as well as the ATF’s attempts to impose new gun control laws through regulation.

We’ll hopefully get that chance next month. Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Thomas Massie have requested that Dettelbach appear before a Judiciary Committee hearing on April 26th to “address the agency’s efforts to regulate firearms through the rulemaking process” so the House GOP isn’t finished with this issue after today’s hearing… though just how open and transparent Dettelbach will be when it’s his turn for a grilling remains an open question.

Amy Swearer owns Keith Olbermann in tweet

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I have a confession to make.

I used to be a fan of Keith Olbermann.

Now, before you get worked up, it was when he was just a gun on ESPN. It was before he decided he needed to get into discussing politics. I can’t say it was before he was deranged, mostly because I don’t know when his derangement started, but it was before it was so obvious to the rest of us.

Why am I talking about Olbermann, though?

Well, probably because he stepped in it again.

It started with a simple tweet:

Now, this is a nothing story. It won’t do much of anything, though I find it amusing and would love to see it pass, but it’s unlikely to be signed into law by this administration, so it’s nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Olbermann, however, had to try and show off a bit and replied with this:

That’s a bold statement to make. After all, how can one keep and bear arms if they don’t actually own any? It makes no sense.

Yet Twitter isn’t exactly a venue known for reasoned debate. It’s a platform for pithy one-liners and that level of stupid is likely to require a lot more than 240 characters. It’ll take, I don’t know, a thousand words, maybe?

Luckily, Twitter also allows pictures, and Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer used to beautifully.

That’s right, a screenshot from Dictionary.com showing just how wrong Olbermann is.

Beautiful.

However, let’s also face one inescapable fact. Olbermann is far from the only person to try to get hyperliteral on the Second Amendment, generally without actually knowing the text particularly well.

First, it’s funny that the people who declare abortion a constitutional right or cry about the separation of church and state would get that literal about the specific words used in the Second Amendment. Neither the phrase “separation of church and state” nor the word “abortion” appears, either, but suddenly that’s not an issue. Funny how that shakes out.

Second, though, is that a lot of people trip over themselves over this attempt at being literal. They claim that the Second Amendment says nothing about carrying guns, despite protecting the right to “bear arms.” It’s not even a term that’s particularly archaic. We still talk about people’s “cross to bear,” for example. People know that bearing something can mean carrying it.

I mean, at least the phrase “well regulated” is rarely used today in the same manner it was in the 1780s. I get why people get confused on that one, though claims that it justifies gun control are still wrong. Yet words like “keep” and “bear” aren’t remotely in the same camp.

So why go down such an empty and fruitless path in an effort to try and oppose the Second Amendment by claiming it doesn’t stay things it clearly does?

In my more charitable moments, I have to believe it’s simply because they don’t know the text. They don’t know what the words actually are, so they assume there’s no mention of something because they don’t know that there is.

Then in my less charitable moods, I just figure they’re lying and hoping people don’t know any better.

Regardless, Olbermann got “owned” by Swearer. He should probably be used to being owned on Twitter by now.

California’s gun control not even good for California

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The state of California has extensive gun control laws, more than pretty much anywhere else in the nation. Despite that, though, they had several mass shootings over the span of just two days.

I mean, it’s almost like gun control laws don’t actually accomplish anything, you know?

Well, I’m far from the only one who thinks that. One of many who share that opinion is Amy Swearer from The Heritage Foundation, who wrote about it recently.

After every high-profile mass shooting, gun control advocates reflexively demand that we “just do something” about the problem. Invariably, that “something” means a very specific set of things, which can be summarized as a singular effort to impose California’s restrictive gun laws at the federal level.

But did anyone bother asking whether California’s “cure” for mass shootings even works in California before peddling it to the nation?

California’s 39.2 million residents comprise 11.8% of the U.S. population. Yet, according to data from the Mother Jones Mass Shooting Database, the state accounts for 20% (17 of 85) of the nation’s mass shootings since 2012, and 16.1% of its mass shooting fatalities.

No other state comes close to bearing as much responsibility for mass shootings as California. In fact, the nation’s second most populous state—Texas—accounts for only 8.2% (7 of 85) mass shootings since 2012, and 14.3% of mass shooting fatalities, despite having a polar opposite approach to gun policy.

While California’s government has spent the last 12 years imposing increasingly more restrictive gun-control measures on its residents, its mass shooting problem isn’t getting better. If anything, it’s getting slightly worse.

Between 2012 and 2017, 20% (8 of 40) of all mass public shooting incidents and 13.4% (48 of 358) of all mass public shooting fatalities occurred in California. From 2018 through mid-February 2023, the state was still responsible for 20% of all mass public shooting incidents, but its share of mass public shooting fatalities soared to a whopping 20.8% (58 of 279).

Isn’t that fascinating?

While people want to lash out at states like Texas for refusing to pass gun control after several high-profile shootings there, California still has a disproportionate number of mass shootings compared to its relative population.

What does that mean?

For one thing, it means the state’s gun control laws don’t actually do all that much to prevent mass shootings. Clearly.

Some will claim that the guns come in from other states, but if that’s the case, why don’t those other states have just as big of an issue with these shootings as California?

Or maybe, just maybe, the problem is something other than guns. Maybe the problem is something we haven’t really had a chance to look at because the aftermath of mass shootings tends to be little more than a renewal of the gun debate with no opportunity to discuss anything else.

You know, just putting that out there.

Look, it’s clear that California’s gun laws aren’t stopping these shootings. As such, there’s even less reason to consider them on a national scale, much less for individual states to consider them.

Mass shootings are an issue, but until we can get past this obsession with gun control, we’re never going to get to the root causes of them so we can put an end to them for good.