Unfortunately, there's probably no way to stop it

Division 80 is a gun parts maker in Texas. Or not. The "company" registered as an LLC last fall, but other other than that, there are no vestiges that it's actually a business at all. No website (the horror!). No address. Nothing that suggests that it's a business doing any sort of business.

But Division 80, whatever it is, is suing AG Merrick Garland and the head of the ATF, claiming that "an unlawful Biden administration policy [has] stripped the company of its livelihood in violation of the Second Amendment."

Manufacturers make gun parts known as “80 percenters,” “lower receivers,” or “receiver blanks” that customers can purchase to assemble their own

firearms. They come in kits that shipped to gun stores across the country are sometimes called as “ghost guns” because it’s difficult for law enforcement to trace their origins. The businesses that make these parts are not regulated by the ATF and do not require a federal firearms license to sell them as do gun stores. (Source: Houston Chronicle)

Whatever Division 80 is or isn't, the last thing we need are more crappy companies helping put more illicit guns into circulation. It's not as if we don't already have more guns than we have capitas. A gun-crazed country getting even crazier. Swell.

Curiously, one of the attorneys mounting the lawsuit on Division 80's behalf lives outside of Boston, a not especially gun-crazed area. Michael Sullivan is a former U.S. Attorney (under GW) and acting head of ATF (ditto). He's got super-typical local lawyer credentials: Boston College, Suffolk Law. It's just that most of our super-typical local lawyers aren't the gun-whackery types. 

Anyway, Sully and his pals are looking:

...“to prevent the Biden Administration from politically weaponizing the ATF and adopting an unlawful (regulation, known as the) Final Rule without Congress’s approval.” The company thinks the new regulation “unlawfully seeks to put law-abiding American companies like Division 80 out of business.”

"Politically weaponizing the ATF." That's rich."

Really, all Biden is doing is trying to "close the loophole that allows the sale of the [gun-making] kits." A reasonable executive-order type approach, given that it's so hard to pass any reasonable gun regulation law, given the extent to which the NRA has politically weaponized weapons.

The new reg - scheduled to go into effect this summer - doesn't, despite their whining, necessarily put the gun guys out of business.

The change in regulations does not prevent a person from making a privately manufactured firearm or require the maker to mark the firearm with a serial number.

However, for parts manufacturers — such as Division 80 — the new regulations could mean they are required to obtain a federal firearms license, maintain records, and perform background checks.

Boo f-ing hoo. 

A growing number of weapons used in crimes are DIY, homemade, ghost guns. Anybody with a 3D printer can become an overnight gunsmith. And someone who orders a gun parts kit can assemble a lethal weapon in about 20 minutes.

Just what we need is more insta-gunsels roaming around.

The sad news, of course, is that there's really no way to stop any of this. Even if the new ruling is upheld, someone who wants to make a gun is going to make one. Someone who wants to acquire a gun is going to acquire one. Someone who wants to use a gun is going to shoot one.

When it comes to gun ownership, We're Number One! with 120.5 guns in civilian hands per 100 people. That's nearly twice the number for first runner up, the Falkland Islands, with 62.1 guns per hundred. In absolute terms, that ain't much. There are fewer than 3,000 people in the Falklands. There are gun owners in the U.S. who have more guns in their gun (un)safes than there are in all of the Falklands.

Yemen ranks third, with 52.8 guns per 100. Yemen. Beleaguered, war-torn Yemen. That's the company we're in.

American exceptionalism in action!

Luckily - dumb luckily, I suspect - we don't have the highest rate of gun violence. That would be Brazil. We don't even make the Top Five. Yay us, I guess.

Still, there's something that's pretty disturbing - to put it mildly - about being such a gun culture. 

Joe Biden's executive action is unlikely to do much of anything about that. It's still worth a try to at least make some attempt to put a tiny little lid on gun proliferation by regulating gun parts that can be so easily assembled into lethal weapons. Might as well go for it. Sadly, however, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to stop our love affair with guns. 

Just one of the areas in which the good old US of A could use a do-over.

Sigh.