Rep. Andrew Clyde says AFT is revoking firearm licenses ‘at a rate of about 500% greater’ under Biden

Federal firearms dealers are getting their licenses revoked or not renewed by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms at a much greater rate since President Biden first came to office, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) said Wednesday.

“Federal Firearms Licensees are being denied renewals or their licenses are being taken away at a rate of about 500% greater since Biden was in office [than in] previous years,” Clyde said during a Second Amendment Caucus press conference.

“So it is definitely obvious that the Biden administration is targeting Federal Firearms Licensees because they are the link between manufacturers and people being able to access their Second Amendment rights,” he said.

Clyde, a federal firearms licensee who owns a store in his Athens district called “Clyde Armory,” said that “the motto of my company is we enable individual participation in the preservation of liberty” by giving people access to guns.

“They enable individual participation in the preservation of liberty, because that’s the only way a person, other than making one themselves, can get a firearm in his hands through a manufacturer is through a Federal Firearms Licensee,” he said. “So if you cut out the Federal Firearms Licensees, then you have denied the American citizens their right to keep in bear arms through not being able to buy a gun. So it’s a problem.”

According to Alan Gottlieb at the Second Amendment Foundation, his organization gets many calls from FFL’s every week telling his group the same story.

“Not so much just a revocation [of an FFl license], but also a fine and just being harassed. There’s a lot more of that going on under the Biden restriction than ever before,” Gottlieb said. “The last time anybody really did anything like that was under Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton figured less guns would be sold if there were less FFL dealers to start with, and so he went out to shrink the number of FFL’s.”

The National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Affairs says that Mr. Biden’s administration is running “Clinton playbook again – operating a ‘zero tolerance’ policy that is shuttering FFLs over trivial violations. This sort of schizophrenic policy-making could give the impression that this ‘strategy’ has been motivated by anti-gun politics rather than concerns about violent crime.”