Restricts on A.T.F., Gun Enforcement On Wednesday, President Obama will unveil his first budget proposal since the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. One thing to look for is whether he will challenge the quiet weakening of gun enforcement embedded in the recently signed Continuing Resolution, the stopgap spending plan for the second half of this fiscal year. Even with gun safety measures headed to the Senate floor, and with memories of the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School still fresh, House and Senate enablers of the gun lobby succeeded in including a half dozen provisions in the C.R., extending crippling restrictions on the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to combat illegal guns. Perhaps the most dangerous of these legislative riders, which have been renewed separately at various points, prohibits the A.T.F. from requiring federally licensed firearms dealers to conduct annual inventories to ensure they have not lost guns or had them stolen. Left to stand, it would undermine any new measure against gun trafficking that Congress might pass. Among the other harmful gun measures in the C.R. is one preventing the Bureau from using gun sales data to "draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crimes," and another establishing a broad definition of "antique" guns that can be imported into the U.S. outside of normal regulations. "The N.R.A. keeps saying we should enforce the gun laws on the books, but it keeps inserting riders to appropriations bills that make it increasingly hard for federal agencies to carry out their policing task," said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the co-author of a March 19 report detailing the practice. Shortly after the report's publication, 43 House Democrats sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget urging exclusion of all existing riders that limit the federal government's ability to enforce gun laws and combat gun crime. Whether the White House will take the Democrats" advice remains to be seen. But it should. Congressional proponents of the risky provisions should be forced to justify their handiwork in public, and have to fight to retain them in current negotiations over stronger gun laws.