Second United
Earlier this summer, the ATF announced that it was reclassifying wetted nitrocellulose as a “high explosive.”
Now, before your eyes glaze over from the chemistry, let me explain. Nitrocellulose is a crucial ingredient in making smokeless gunpowder. On its own, it is a volatile compound. So, gunpowder manufacturers add water to the compound to make it less volatile. This is what is known as wetted nitrocellulose.
The ATF released a newsletter in June saying that this non-volatile wetted compound would be reclassified as a high explosive.
This threatened to grind the entire domestic ammunition manufacturing industry to a halt. The industry wouldn’t be able to transport or store this compound the way they had for decades. Overnight, every single gunpowder manufacturer became non-compliant.
If this regulatory change was allowed to move forward, it would have forced many smaller gunpowder makers out of business and those that were able to survive the new regulatory burden would be forced to raise their prices.
If gunpowder becomes more expensive and less plentiful, then loaded ammunition becomes more expensive and less plentiful.
Our sister-site, Conservative-Daily, called a spade a spade: This was a backdoor ban on ammunition. Even if only a temporary hiccup, this regulatory change would send shockwaves through the industry.
Well, the website Snopes.com picked up the story and declared that our truthfulness was “mixture.”
Why? Because the ATF published an addendum to their regulatory announcement half a day after our original article was written.
At Conservative-Daily, we focus on taking important issues that the mainstream media doesn’t cover and driving people do action.
In between when we published our article and when the ATF backed down, we sent almost 100,000 faxes to Congress on behalf of our readers. The ATF ended up being pressured into declaring that it would refrain from making any final decision until it talked with the industry.
It is truly remarkable that a website like Snopes would accuse us of lying because the ATF ended up backing down as a result of pressure from conservative websites and organizations like us.
But this is definitely a learning moment for the Conservative movement. In the span of 48 hours, we went from learning about a devastating new anti-ammo regulation that had the potential to cripple an entire industry to and ended up forcing the ATF to back down.
And did the mainstream media cover it? Did any news show devote a segment to it?
No and no.
I turned on the news yesterday and they were showing live helicopter video of two bears playing in a dumpster.
That was the news they chose to cover instead of the ATF being forced to back away from another anti-gun regulation.
This is why niche websites are thriving and why we hope that SecondUnited will thrive as well. As long as major news organizations are allowed to curate what news people are allowed to hear about, we will continue to fight an uphill battle.
That is why we exist and that is why we will continue to fight to make sure that you know EVERY development in the firearm community and the fight to preserve our 2nd Amendment rights.
