As called out by the National Association for Gun Rights online and Gunpowder Magazine, the President’s nominee for Attorney General, William Barr, made a startling statement regarding Second Amendment rights during his confirmation hearing:

“I think that the problem of our time is to get an effective system in place that can keep dangerous firearms out of the hands of mentally ill people. That is, should be, priority number one. And it’s gonna take some hard work, and we need to get on top of the problem… We need to agree to standards that are prohibitors of people who are mentally ill. We have to get the resources in to get the system built up the way we did many years ago on the felon records and so forth. We have to get the system working, and as I say, it’s sort of piecemeal right now. We need to get some energy behind it and get it done.

I also think we need to push along the ERPOs (Extreme Risk Protection Orders), so that we have these red flag laws to supplement the use of the background check to find out if someone has some mental disturbance. This is the single most important thing I think we can do, in the gun control area, to stop these massacres from happening in the first place.”