By: Anthony Morelli
No one can ever predict what Trump is going to do on guns.
He is a total wild card on this important issue.
And his administration just made a move that’ll be very harmful to the gun industry.
Donald Trump has never been able to fully embrace the Second Amendment the way many of his supporters have wanted him to.
While he has done many things on other issues that get conservatives excited, and he continues to do those things, when it comes to guns, he often leaves people scratching their heads.
That doesn’t mean that everything he has done is bad, and in fact he made some promises during the campaign that left gun owners feeling fairly optimistic.
But it was a cautious optimism after some of the decisions that he made on guns during his first go-round in office.
Now gun owners are going to be disappointed after he made a bad decision that will seriously harm the gun industry.
And by extension, if the gun industry suffers, the Second Amendment suffers as it will be harder for ordinary people to buy guns.
According to The Reload, “The Department of Commerce stopped issuing gun export licenses around the beginning of the month, according to multiple sources who spoke with The Reload.
“The department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which oversees firearms exporting, issued a hold without action order for all export licenses on February 5th. It did so without warning, public explanation, or even private communication with many of the affected companies. Industry insiders said the total freeze is unlike anything they’d seen before.”
These gun manufacturers probably expected things to get better after their brutal treatment under Joe Biden, but apparently things got worse instead of better.
Now they are pleading with Trump to reverse this decision and to help them instead of harming them even more.
The article continues, “The new freeze represents another setback for firearms exporters, who had a significant portion of their business upended during a months-long pause of certain gun exports during the end of the Biden Administration. Only a few months after BIS started processing new firearms export licenses under tighter rules, exporters and their businesses are once again waiting in limbo. Additionally, the Trump Administration’s freeze is even more expansive than the previous one.”
“‘This is unprecedented,’ Larry Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), told The Reload. ‘That’s never been done previously when there was a change in administration.’”
No one seems to know exactly why the Trump administration did this, as they certainly have no political reason to beat up on gun manufacturers, most of whom were on his side in the election.
It’s possible that the Department of Commerce did this without his sign-off, although unlikely as Trump has been tightening his grip of power on executive branch agencies.
Whatever the reason is, gun owners and the gun industry need to urge Trump to reverse this bad decision and respect the Second Amendment.