ATF

President Donald Trump’s pardoning blitz has dominated the headlines with reality-TV stars, a rapper and political allies all walking free from prison after he granted them clemency. But quietly in the office of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney – where all of the above appeals were processed – a much more significant and wide-reaching process of forgiveness is taking shape. Ed Martin, Trump loyalist and new pardon attorney, is preparing his team to review applications from people – a lot of people – with criminal convictions to have their gun rights restored. “The pardon staff has already been working at it, because we anticipate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of applicants,” Martin told the Wall Street Journal.

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.” The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so via a federal background check.