Straw Purchases, Family Gifts, and the Need for Objective Rules at the Gun Counter

This is the first post in a series of six by Jonathan Goldstein adapting a set of administrative comment letters submitted in response to recent ATF rulemakings. The posts are designed to make the central legal and policy arguments more accessible to a broader audience while preserving the statutory, constitutional, and administrative-law issues raised in the underlying comments. Readers interested in the full legal argument, proposed regulatory text, and citations can find the comment letter that is the basis of this post here.

Federal firearms law has long treated straw purchasing as a serious problem. That is not controversial. The harder question is how the law should distinguish an unlawful straw purchase from the many lawful situations in which one person buys, retrieves, pays for, or receives a firearm in a transaction involving another person.

Read the full article: https://firearmsresearchcenter.org/forum/straw-purchases-family-gifts-and-the-need-for-objective-rules-at-the-gun-counter/