Quote:Nearly a year ago, President Joe Biden issued an executive order aimed at "increasing the number of background checks conducted before firearm sales, moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation." According to the watchdog group Empower Oversight, which cites two unnamed "whistleblowers" at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the agency is working on regulations that would go all the way, purporting to require background checks for all private gun sales. It is hard to see how the ATF can do that "without additional legislation."

Under current federal law, background checks are required only for sales by federally licensed dealers. A rule that the ATF proposed last September would expand the definition of "dealer" to encompass some but not all occasional gun sellers. But even that controversial proposal does not go as far as the plan described by Empower America's sources, who say "the ATF has drafted a 1,300-page document in support of a rule that would effectively ban private sales of firearms from one citizen to another by requiring background checks for every sale."