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53 Year old Brian Malinowski was killed in an ATF raid. He was a director at the Clinton National Airport in Little Rock. (This airport was named for the Clintons but is unconnected to them personally so we can put our tinfoil hats away for now.) We have no body camera footage of the shooting, they claimed he fired at them and they fired back during their 6am raid.
The search warrant, partially redacted, was released to the public. In it we find they raided him due to his frequent activity of buying and selling firearms without the required FFL licence.
Selling your private gun collection without involving the state is something that has been legal in the US forever, but buying and selling as a business is not. The law is written such that Grandma may sell her deceased husbands musket collection without fear of state reprisal, but you cannot buy bulk AR's and distribute them to the local gang for a big profit. What counts as a business? How many guns can you sell from your collection before you cross the threshold? How fast can you turn around and sell a gun after you buy without fear of breaking the law? This law is ambiguous on this, it is what politicians have referred to as "The gun show loophole". The idea being that you can take your personal firearms and sell them at a gunshow booth (or anywhere) without having to do a background check on potential buyers.
Brian Malinowski is a novel case. He bought and sold 150 guns over a two year period, some of them sold fairly quickly after he purchased them. This was high enough to get him on the ATF's watch list - they tailed his vehicle and observed him at his job at the airport. His job seems unconnected to his firearm hobby as the warrant never accuses him of smuggling through the airport. It heavily implies this is what was happening, mentioning the airport frequently throughout the warrant, but they never suggest that he actually did. It does, however, mention his selling his collection through booths at a gun show to undercover ATF agents.
So what of downstream crimes that have occurred from Malinowski selling these firearms "off the books"? Here the ATF's case seems very weak. Out of the 150 guns sold, only 3 have been directly tied to crimes stated in the warrant. The crimes? All three are marijuana possession during routine traffic stops (marijuana still being very illegal and heavily policed in Arkansas). Personally I think this is extremely petty and very favorable to the late Malinowski's case. There is one other mention of an undercover informant in Canada having a photo of a firearm with a serial number that ties back to Malinowski, with no additional details given.
In my opinion, I believe Malinowski was technically legally in the right despite the high volume of sales. There is no indication he was attempting to profit from selling to criminals/gangs etc. Many people collect firearms and enjoy buying and selling them as others would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on motorcycles or pokemon cards. There is no law in Arkansas against purchasing a handgun and deciding you don't like it for whatever reason and selling it to your neighbor the next day. That said, Malinowski is reported to have been somewhat of an asshole by those who knew him, having previously lost a lawsuit in 2018 in which he sued someone over a mailbox in front of an empty lot after confronting them pretending to be an attorney. Given this and that he was on record stating that his activity was legally protected private collection sales when pressed, and the ATF suggests he continued his activity after he knew they were tailing him, I think it's highly probable he knew what he was doing and was intentionally skirting the boundary of the law in order to provoke a legal confrontation.
This is a good culture war inflection point in the gun control debate. Leftists can point this case as an example that the Gun Show Loophole is in fact, real, and is being exploited by so-called hobbyists selling bulk firearms. Rightist can point to rogue federal agencies abusing ambiguous laws in order to infringe 2A rights by routing around political representation.
*Disclaimer: IANAL etc.
Putting on my tinfoil hat for a second:
In placing my expectations for the upcoming presidential election, I stated to people that I expect Biden to pull it out. Primarily because I expect MAGA types to do a few unacceptably bad things between now and November. Somebody in a red hat is gonna shoot a cop and lose the election for Trump among normies. A lot of extreme MAGA fringe has gone very, wildly, anti-government since 2020. One of those guys is going to do something really bad between now and November.
I wouldn't be shocked if the upper levels of the admin were aware of this too. And they might choose to take enforcement actions that will make a MAGA shootout more likely. Things like aggressively pursuing marginal "trading in guns without a license" crimes committed by 50yo white men in Arkansas.
Expect more of this.
I do expect more of this. But that's because of my low opinion of said extreme MAGA fringe, not because of bureaucratic honeypots. You could replace Biden with a rock that read "VETO ALL INCOMING BILLS", and I doubt his popularity among that fringe would shift. Not enough for a statistically significant change in the odds of, say, shooting up a post office.
So how do we distinguish the two? What's a bet that only comes true if the ATF (or DoJ, or Biden's cabinet, or Hillary Clinton's shadow government) is actually trying to generate martyrs?
I mean to be totally fair, the Biden admin shifting law enforcement attention towards flyover whites with right wing views does seem to be a thing that’s factually happening. Granted it seems like that’s happening more out of the mistaken belief that this group is about to launch a jihad, but taking enforcement efforts against people in maga hats that they normally wouldn’t take is probably actually happening and that does make thing like this more likely.
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