BlogWonks

The lamestream media told you:

Nothing, though the dangerous and highly unregulated Internet circulated numerous stories on proposed OSHA regulations that would have a subtle side effect of… closing all federally licensed firearms dealers in America.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

It is hard to imagine a hotter hot button than a brazen attempt to delete the right to keep and bear arms from the people. It is even harder to imagine a bureaucrat or politician who doesn’t know that.

With that as a backdrop, OSHA proposed treating ANY workplace that contained even a handful of small-arms cartridges, for any reason, “a facility containing explosives.”

Under that designation, no one could carry “firearms, ammunition, or similar articles,” with narrow exceptions (like for security guards). You would need demolition certifications for clerks, searches of customers coming in, closures during thunderstorms — this would have forced any normal gun store, firing range or gunsmith shop to close down.

It came within a hair’s breadth of slipping by everyone and passing into law. NSSF, SAAMI and the NRA-ILA, with an outpouring of support from grassroots activists, have fortunately succeeded in temporarily delaying the proposed OSHA gun ban.

I have reasonable faith that the industry and gun-lobby forces, now alerted, will craft a proper improvement to this OSHA proposal that would have wiped out America’s gun stores and ranges. I don’t plan to devote much time to that effort, unless it seems to be going astray. Imposing impossible-to-meet and completely irrelevant explosive-demolition regulations on firearms dealers and their staffers was a brilliant and unexpected attack on gun rights.

What I do think we need to examine though is how OSHA got on that track. These things don’t happen by accident. Someone was behind this incredibly sneaky, underhanded and enormously novel tactic for banning guns in America. Someone out there feels mighty proud of the attempt, even if it has been stopped, for now, and I have no doubt such minds will concoct future efforts.

Who are the perpetrators? How do we bring them to justice? How do we expose and humiliate their tyrannical effort and dastardly clever approach to civil rights denial? How do we treat the attorneys who wrote it and are going to claim they were just following orders, that they had no idea this would effect gun ownership, and saw nothing amiss in the proposal?

Who among you is willing to do the legwork, file an FOIA request, poke around a little?

You’ve got to hand it to the anti-rights mob that dreamed this up. A tremendous sneak attack that almost succeeded — it was stopped within mere hours of execution. No one saw it coming. It’s a whole new fresh approach to banning guns the antis have not used before.

Wouldn’t it be nice to sneak through a regulation of our own in some bland dull policy rewrite and say… any elected, appointed or hired individual who attempts to deny a person’s rights without full open debate shall be subject to imprisonment? Why would an honest government official object?