Do you know the real problem in America, and why having a new president doesn’t help you much?
Unelected Officials.
This is the shadow government — referred to as the Deep State — comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes and running our government right now.
I’ll explain further and you’ll see how they’re ruining one Veteran’s business (and life) right under Trump’s nose:
What Is The Deep State And How Are They Running Our Country?
These are the unelected officials that actually run almost ALL of the different government organizations that can make your life hell.
Former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren has written extensively about this, saying:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.
All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted.
The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.”
The worse part, and my main point, is these are unelected officials within these organizations … they are NOT elected by the people … that means … that they have absolutely no responsibility to the people.
You can’t vote them into or out of office.
You can’t bombard their office with letters/phone calls about how you’re displeased with their service (well, you theoretically could, if you could find out who was actually in charge).
And yet, they have the power to interpret laws — using their own opinions — and those opinions have the power of law.
So when they interpret laws how they see fit, they have the POWER of law, without ever having Congress pass a law.
And they make the VAST majority of the decisions. This Forbes article (from 2011) notes (emphasis mine):
“Congress has exceeded its constitutional authority in delegating such power to unaccountable agencies. Sadly, this is not limited just to these recent laws, but rather it is business as usual in Washington, D.C.
Today there are more than 300 independent and regulatory agencies that publish more than 75,000 pages of new and proposed rules in the Federal Register every year. At the beginning of each calendar quarter, the executive orders, rules and regulations in the Federal Register that become final law are included in the Code of Federal Regulations. The current edition of the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 200 volumes in length. By comparison, the entire U.S. Code, which contains all the laws passed by Congress and signed by the president, is roughly 35 volumes.”
Get it?
This article, printed in 2011 no less, makes it clear: 200 volumes of rules/regulations by unaccountable officials that actually govern your life VS only 35 volumes of laws actually passed by Congress and signed by the President.
That’s how stuff like this happens …
ATF Shuts Down Veteran’s Solvent Trap Line
SD Tactical Arms of Prescott, Arizona sells firearms stuff. It appears that they sold both regular NFA-regulated silencers of their own manufacture and also a line of “solvent traps”.
“As of today the ATF shut down our business of selling solvent traps,” A Facebook post by SD says.
The continue, “This is 99% of our income. They have put 3 Veterans, my wife and son out of work. They said I can’t sell freeze plugs. NAPA can’t even sell them to us because they are a suppressor part. They said all I can sell is complete suppressors.”
SD is appealing and hoping the new president will help, using the hashtag #Americandreamlost on Social Media he says:
“My plea for help is to make this Viral to the Trump admin, the Trump family and such. I have been put in the street over mindless opinions. I had talked to the ATF in the past and they had no issues. Today they shut us down,” reads the post.
SD Tactical noted the ATF did not get a copy of their customer list.
They also noted that if the new silencer act in Congress doesn’t pass, then they will have to go out of business (because the Solvent Traps were such a big source of revenue).
Again, this is the problem with unelected officials like the ones who run the ATF who are given the power to decide how to interpret laws.
They can change their minds on a whim and their “opinions” have the force of law!
And you can’t vote these guys out because they work for the organization not the people.
(That’s why regime changes in Washington rarely amount to much real change in your day-to-day life and level of freedom.)
How The ATF Could Throw You In Jail For Owning a Gun and a Water Bottle
From what I gather, SD posted what appears to be the text of a letter from the ATF’s Firearms Industry programs Branch (FIPB) which first said:
The stated intent of a solvent trap is to catch and trap gun cleaning solvent during bore cleaning operations commonly performed on firearms. Solvent traps do attach to the muzzle of a firearm but do not have any design features intended to allow a bullet to pass through them. Since as originally manufactured they are not intended to silence, muffle or diminish the report of a portable firearm they are not silencers..
It also said this:
However, if the solvent trapped (sic) was redesigned or utilized to assemble a device for silencing, muffling or diminishing the report of a portable firearm or if intent was demonstrated to use the device for silencing, muffling or diminishing the report of a portable firearm, the solvent trap would be classified as a “firearm silencer.”
So by using this logic, and shutting down this man’s business, basically ANYTHING that could be “redesigned” into a silencing device would be grounds for violating the NFA laws against silencers.
Think about that logic.
So that means if you have a gun and a water bottle sitting in your home, the ATF could potentially bust you using the same type of logic because “while the stated intent” of a water bottle is not to be a silencer and “as originally manufactured they are not intended to silence, muffle or diminish the report of a portable firearm they are not silencers …”
But remember! The ATF says “However, if the water bottle (sic) was redesigned or utilized to assemble a device for silencing, muffling or diminishing the report of a portable firearm or if intent was demonstrated to use the device for silencing, muffling or diminishing the report of a portable firearm, the water bottle would be classified as a “firearm silencer.””
Of course, a quick visit to Youtube reveals how to “redesign or utilize” a water bottle to assemble a silencer:
You’ll note that nothing about the SD Tactical shut down said they had ACTUALLY turned these solvent traps into silencers.
The entire shutdown appears to be because people could potentially turn them into silencers.
That’s crazy.
But this is the America we’re living in and why — even though I personally LIKE Trump and think he’s awesome — I don’t think much will change under his administration because practically our entire country/government is actually ran by the unelected “shadow government” or “Deep State” that is responsible to no one but themselves.