How the Second Amendment fared in the midterms :: 11/10/2022

The short version: better than you might think, but not as good as you were probably expecting.

We’ve already gone over some of the highs and lows of the Election Day here, from the sweep of Constitutional Carry governors winning re-election to the too-close-too-call races in Colorado’s Third Congressional District (where Lauren Boebert is a few thousand votes behind her Democratic opponent) and Oregon, where the gun control initiative Measure 114 is also narrowly ahead on the ballot, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about those particular elections in this post.

Instead, I want to focus on what happens next. If, as expected, Republicans take control of the House, the prospects of any gun control legislation getting to Joe Biden’s desk are reduced to zero; in an of itself a substantial win for Second Amendment activists. But control of the House would also allow for at least some GOP oversight over the ATF, something that I anticipate will be of critical importance over the next two years. The agency is still planning to implement new rules on pistol stabilizing braces that could result in millions of legal gun owners becoming paperwork criminals overnight, and the gun control lobby is urging the Biden administration to take even more drastic action; declaring many common semi-automatic firearms to be considered machine guns under the National Firearms Act by claiming they’re “readily converted” into machine guns.