On May 23, 2024,  ATF Director Steven Dettelbach was grilled during the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Oversight of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The hearing was focused on several issues dealing with the ATF including the Engaged in Business Rule, modifications to the Pistol Brace Rule, and the murder of the Director of the Little Rock Airport by the ATF during the execution of a search warrant in March 2024.

“Dettelbach needs to be fired and the ATF needs to be shut down. Ten carloads of heavily armed jack-booted thugs with no body cams rollup on the Airport Director’s house in a wealthy neighborhood. They sneak up to the house and put tape over the doorbell camera. 57 seconds later Bryan Malinowski is dead,” declared Dudley Brown, President of the National Association for Gun Rights. “This sounds like the plot of an organized crime movie, but it is just another rogue operation carried out by a bunch of out-of-control nutjobs at the ATF.”

Malinowski was the highest earning municipal employee in the city of Little Rock making over $260k annually and occasionally sold firearms at gun shows as a hobby. Agents came to his home to serve a search warrant to collect evidence to support their argument that Malinowski was “Engaged in Business” under their new regulation.

“The problem with the ‘Engaged in Business Rule’ is the ATF Director can’t even tell you what the definition is. He was asked repeatedly today how many firearms you have to sell to be considered in the business, he couldn’t say. The issue with that is you get five years and $250,000 fine if you cross their incomprehensible line. The alternative being they come to your house and shoot you in front of your wife,” declared Brown.

Under the direction of the Biden regime, the ATF published a new rule in 2023 reclassifying which individuals constitute firearms dealers, which greatly broadened the Background Check System to encompass nearly all firearms sales in America. NAGR has been fighting attempts to impose universal background checks since the Toomey-Manchin congressional fight of 2013, which took place in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre.

“The ATF and Biden are playing definition games with U.S. Code as a means to ban the private transfer of firearms,” stated Dudley Brown, President of NAGR. “The language of this proposed rule gives the government near universal authority to prosecute anyone who transfers a firearm.”

The ATF is a pernicious institution that needs to be abolished. The longer it exists, the more likely that Second Amendment rights will be destroyed. There is no reforming such a corrupt institution.