The following is part 2 of the ATF and Jeffery Cohen.
Here is a link to Part 1: Fast and Furious: Did ATF’s Top Lawyer Jeffrey Cohen Approve the Deadly Operation?
Jeffrey Cohen had spent decades interpreting the Gun Control Act – about how the law could be interpreted and enforced.
From a quiet boy at Hackley School in Tarrytown to a suit behind a desk in Princeton, Cohen carved out a career in law enforcement.
He wasn’t chasing cigarette trucks or storming gun shows. He was in his office, engineering ways to seize property, revoke licenses, and close businesses.
A quiet architect. He was the ATF lawyer who always said, “It’s within the scope of our authority.”
His work involved revoking Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) for “willful” violations, a standard Cohen helped define.
Zero Tolerance: The Strategist Behind the Scenes
The Second Amendment was his battlefield.
Zero tolerance was the mantra.
Cohen knew how to turn policy into a weapon. He knew how to aim it at civilians, small business owners, citizens trying to make a living selling guns.
Firearms License revoked? That was Cohen. Asset seizure? That was Cohen. Compliance violations no one understood? Cohen.
When they wanted to squeeze firearms dealers out of business, Cohen wrote the strategy.
When Fast and Furious let cartel thugs walk away with thousands of weapons, Cohen helped cover the legal fallout.
Cohen’s ATF let actual traffickers move guns across the border and let violent criminals slip through the cracks.
But an honest gun store owner who missed a decimal point on a form? A retired cop selling a rifle without the right paperwork? They were the ones who felt the ATF’s full force.
Cohen’s legal strategies targeted firearms dealers for clerical errors on ATF Form 4473, used to justify severe financial penalties, including license revocations.
Fast and Furious—he may not have written the plan, but it couldn’t have gone forward without him.
The dead? A border agent, overdose victims, civilians caught in cartel crossfire—weren’t in his reports.
But Cohen’s big role was policy development, ensuring that each new rule chipped away at gun ownership. He handled litigation, ensuring that when the ATF abused its power, it had the legal muscle to defend itself.
He supported criminal enforcement, helping agents justify raids that stripped Americans of their rights while looking the other way when the same weapons ended up in cartel hands.
They came with clipboards and badges. The kind of visit that starts with a knock and ends with a revoked license, a shuttered store, a man standing in the ruins of his livelihood wondering what, exactly, he did wrong.
FFL holders, mom-and-pop gun shops, veteran-owned stores—audited, accused, stripped of rights.
Cohen knew how to make regulations stretch enough to turn a right into a privilege, a privilege into a liability.
For decades, the ATF tightened the noose on gun owners. FFL holders targeted for clerical errors, shops closed for minor infractions.
The ATF called it compliance.
Registry and Background Checks: Misuse in the Name of the Law
While federal law prohibits the creation of a national gun registry, critics have argued that the ATF’s record-keeping and background check systems effectively function as de facto registries.
Cohen’s influence extended to redefining laws and regulations, such as those targeting “ghost guns” and pistol braces. These reinterpretations turned previously legal firearms into illegal ones, creating new liabilities for gun owners and dealers.
The “pistol brace ban” was a tipping point. The ATF’s reclassification of what constituted a rifle overnight made millions of Americans lawbreakers.
Those braces, long sold legally as accessories, now turned everyday citizens into felons who hadn’t even realized the law had changed.
Ghost gun crackdowns.
Redefining laws to make yesterday’s legal gun tomorrow’s felony.
And while Cohen was busy targeting law-abiding Americans, the ATF played a different game with criminals.
Fast and Furious was proof. They let the cartels have guns. They let thousands of firearms disappear into the hands of killers, drug lords, human traffickers.
The government wasn’t disarming criminals—it was arming them.
But the law-abiding store owner in Texas, the rancher in Montana, and the retired cop in Ohio were the people Cohen made sure were tangled in paperwork, burdened by restrictions, threatened with seizures, audits, and compliance checks.
ATF: Curbing the Second Amendment?
Gun control wasn’t coming from Congress. It was coming from the ATF, from Cohen, a bureaucrat, dismantling the Second Amendment one policy at a time.
For 40 years, Cohen sat at his desk, signing off on the ATF’s war against the Second Amendment. Gun store owners—gone, with a single revoked license.
Cohen’s job wasn’t to enforce the law—it was to shape it, stretch it, and manipulate it until a constitutional right looked like a privilege, and a privilege looked like a crime.
The ATF’s audits and compliance checks, often targeting small, family-owned gun shops, were a hallmark of its enforcement strategy.
Redefine what a firearm is. Change the classification of a part. Raise the burden of compliance past the point where small dealers could survive.
To anti-gun groups, his policies were victories in a war they couldn’t win through Congress.
For the ATF, he was a star. For gun owners, he was a nemesis whose handiwork they felt in lost rights and ruined lives.
Cohen’s Linkedin page says he’s still working for the AFT. It also says he’s #opentowork. Does he know something we don’t know?
To be continued…
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