Bricking Up A Non-Existent Loophole

     The "Gun Show Loophole," as commonly understood, doesn't exist.  If you have a Federal Firearms License (FFL), you've got to run a federal background check and keep proper records no matter where you're doing the selling.  It doesn't make an iota of difference if you're selling them across the counter at a brick and mortar store or off a folding table at a gun show.

     If you are buying and selling firearms as a business, you've got to have an FFL, period.*  The BATFE has long had considerable discretion in deciding just who is trading in arms as a source of income and who's a hobbyist, swapping or selling the occasional firearm.  The Feds rarely go after the guy at a gunshow with a table full of uncommon or specialized examples unless his behavior is particularly egregious; it's a bit arbitrary but in recent years, this has worked without excessive friction.  (The person selling guns out of their trunk on a streetcorner [etc.] is a whole other thing, and deliberate edge cases like 80% receivers -- so-called "ghost guns" -- operate in an area of considerable legal jeopardy and contention.)

     Gun sales are regulated.  They have been probably all of your life; the Federal Firearms Act of 1938 introduced the requirement for dealers to be licensed and the system was revised and made more stringent under the Gun Control Act of 1968.  The NICS "instant check" began in 1998.  You may dislike these laws, or question the constitutionality of some or even all of their provisions, but they're what we've got and if you own guns, you have almost certainly filled out a 4473 form and had a background check run.  Like it or not, it's routine.

     All that background is explaining why I was looking sideways at the radio this morning when a newscaster said the Biden administration had "fixed the gun show loophole."

     Yeah, no.  That's how it's being sold to low-information audiences, which I am sorry to say includes a lot of news coverage.  That's not what it is.  Like most such things, you can go look in the horse's mouth, and what's in there are...horseteeth.

     The fact sheet linked above explains the long-standing reality I covered in my first paragraph: location doesn't matter, the rules apply, and it's been that way all along.  The remainder of it takes the "considerable discretion" BATFE already had and gets more specific about just what constitutes acting as a dealer and not a hobbyist, what differentiates selling some items from a collection from being a dealer, and so on.  It appears they're going to be looking very narrowly at the ability of a former FFL to sell off their last inventory, which was already legally messy, and it concludes with some press-release talk about other efforts to enforce existing law and exhorts Congress to do more.

     It's not a nothingburger, but if you were looking for red meat, you'll have to look pretty hard.  It's a self-goal for an election year and no doubt I'll be getting glossy ads from the usual suspects about "gun-grabbers" from one side and "keeping our kids safe" from the other.  These changes do neither.  They're minor, and the main people who will be affected are the non-FFL traders with a gunshow table full of semi-random assortments of guns, show after show after show; and I've got to tell you, probably half of those folks were already on the hook with BATFE, serving as bait to catch far worse offenders.

     I suppose in a world where the political Right is peeing all over their shoes with craziness about abortion (and contraception, et Comstock cetera) that is mostly going to motivate voters to push back, cosmic balance requires the political Left to find an issue that only plays well in their own echo chambers.  This is certainly one, but there's far less to it than shows up in the headlines.
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* Hobbyists who collect odd, unusual or historical firearms that the law defines as "Curio & Relic" guns are eligible for their own special FFL; they are not dealers, but the license lets them buy, sell and swap their collectibles with other "C&R" licensees without running afoul of Federal regulations.  The record-keeping is somewhat onerous -- but a serious collector is already keeping track, so....