CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb
By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Following the overwhelming public backlash over the proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that would ban a popular cartridge for the AR-15 rifle, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms called on BATF Director B. Todd Jones to step down, or be fired.
According to CCRKBA, suggesting an ammunition ban was a “colossal blunder.” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said it was a clear victory for grassroots Second Amendment activism, no matter how short lived it may turn out to be.
“I’ve put a lot more thought into this than the ATF apparently did when it suggested that the M855 ammunition should be re-classified,” Gottlieb said in a press release saying that Jones should go. “But when Jones took over the agency, first as an acting director in 2011 and then became the permanent director in 2013, the public, and especially the Second Amendment community, had high hopes that he would straighten out the ATF. This ammunition ban blunder clearly shows that he hasn’t.”
The BATF back-step came as suddenly as the Feb. 13 BATF revelation that it was considering the ban and was giving the public until next Monday, March 16, to offer comments. As yesterday’s surrender message from BATF noted, people did respond in remarkable numbers. More than 80,000 comments were received and the agency acknowledged most of them were negative.
But CCRKBA didn’t just point to the bullet ban proposal. The grassroots organization, which has some 650,000 members and supporters, also referred to the suspicious deletion of language specifically exempting the M855 round from the “armor piercing” definition in the newest edition of ATF regulations. The agency issued a mea culpa statement and promised to fix the error, but not before gun rights activists across the country theorized that the so-called “misprint” was actually a signal that the ATF had already decided to ban the cartridge.
The fiasco caused prices for M855 ammunition to skyrocket and for supplies to shrink fast as gun owners rushed to stock up in anticipation of a ban. The Tampa Tribune reported today that the M855 round was not a traditional hot seller in one Florida store called Lincoln Tactical, but that the shop’s owner said the ammunition was selling for $2 a round at a local gun show last weekend, when it typically runs about 40 cents a cartridge, a price hike that seems suspiciously like price gouging.
Gottlieb noted that while Jones may not have been personally involved in the “misprint” situation, this gaffe “happened on his watch, and the timing is suspicious at the very least.” There are other problems with Jones that Gottlieb detailed.
“Over the years,” he said, “the BATF has earned the reputation of being a rogue agency. Anti-gunners defended the agency through the Fast and Furious scandal by blaming the lack of a permanent director. When Jones was permanently appointed, there was at least a presumption that things would change. But nobody was fired over Fast and Furious, much less prosecuted.
“Now BATF tried to ban ammunition that was specifically identified in regulations as exempt from definition as armor-piercing at the same time the exemption vanished from the regulations pamphlet,” Gottlieb said. “You cannot run a law-enforcement agency by criminalizing legal products, or by deliberately attempting to change policies that only affect law-abiding citizens.”
The massive public response to the BATF proposal was a strong indication that gun owners remain a political force to be reckoned with.
