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Some red hot gospel there!

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Is Anyone in Illinois Actually Registering Their Guns? Our Weekly Check In with Illinois.

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International Tribunal Lawsuit an Unconstitutional Attempt to Subvert Second Amendment by David Codrea

From the looks of things, Venezuelan immigrant Manuel Oliver doesn’t want a global government to even allow citizens in the land that took him in to have revolvers. (Change the Ref/Twitter/X)

“If the US can’t fix its gun policy, maybe an international lawsuit can,” attorney and Global Action on Gun Violence (GAGV) President Jonathan Lowy declares in an opinion piece in The Boston Globe. “Lax US gun policy has caused an international public health and safety crisis, and blatantly violates human rights laws.”

Lowy, former Chief Counsel and VP Legal for Brady, “filed papers … under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to provide legal and consulting services to the government of Mexico and plans to work with other nations on similar efforts,” Time reported in 2022. “Lowy has already worked with the government of Mexico and lawyers in Canada to file three lawsuits against U.S. gunmakers in the last four years.” (The Mexican government argued that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) does not extend to damages caused in Mexican territory and tiled an appeal after its $10B complaint was dismissed in a Boston federal court last year).

Joaquin Oliver v USA was filed in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent legal body of the Organization of American States,” New York advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo announced in September. “The lawsuit argues that Inter-American human rights law requires the United States to prevent firearms manufacturers, distributors, and dealers from recklessly making and selling guns in ways that cause deaths and injuries.

“The US, like other nations, is obligated to protect the exercise of these human rights; a State cannot simply tolerate its people to be systematically and repeatedly deprived of their lives,” the publicity release elaborated. “The suit explains that US gun policies and the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions are inconsistent with the human right to live that the US is required to respect, and enable the gun industry to profit from crime throughout the region.”

The ones truly profiting, of course, are corrupt Mexican officials and their cartel patrons, who aren’t getting actual military equipment and grenades from U.S. gun shops and onesie-twosie “straw purchasers.”

That Lowy’s shakedown effort is being managed by professional ad agency spin doctors says much in terms of Astroturf vs. grassroots. Gun owners have seen before the misinformation that results from high production value “PSAs” representing themselves as reliable documentation instead of what they really are – scripted commercials engineered to get the viewers to “buy” something. So where’s the money coming from?

At this point, it’s not that obvious. A Who.Is registrar search shows the GAGV domain hidden behind a proxy, and its IRS ruling is so new that no tax documents are posted yet on the Guidestar nonprofit reporting website. It is shown there to be a Washington D.C. entity, and a business filings search at DC.gov CorpOnline shows Lowy operating at the same address as the Violence Policy Center. They’re the ones who advocate exploiting public ignorance to gin up mob demands for gun bans:

“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

So much for Lowy and his new lawfare group. What about Manuel Oliver, the plaintiff?

Read more: https://www.ammoland.com/2023/11/international-tribunal-lawsuit-an-unconstitutional-attempt-to-subvert-second-amendment/#ixzz8Jf7SyMBt

He and his wife had their child Joaquin brutally taken from them. Those of us with children who have not suffered such a soul-eviscerating loss can only imagine the terror and agony they have had to endure and will be forced to live with every day for the rest of their lives.

With that in mind, all people of good conscience will naturally feel sympathy and would offer comfort if we could. And with that acknowledged, our sympathy does not give sufferers leave to lay claim to our rights, especially when doing so serves the interests of violence monopolists and power interests obsessed with disarming their countrymen.

We’ve heard their arguments and we reject them. The Parkland monster, who passed a much-ballyhooed “background check,” was nonetheless known to authorities and exploited an ostensible “gun-free” zone “defended” by a school resource officer who sheltered himself outside the building while his young charges were being slaughtered.

They’ve heard our arguments and rejected them. Our solutions are mutually exclusive. We can’t all get along.

“If the US can’t fix its gun policy, maybe an international lawsuit can. It’s time to change the game!” Oliver repeated Lowy’s assertion. And we can see from other posts in his account some of the “gun policies” he means to “fix.”

He’s against allowing Lake City ammunition to be sold to the civilian market. He spreads the meme that the NRA and the GOP (and their tens of millions of policy supporters) are devils. He calls Gov. Ron De Santis (and by default his supporters) “political rats.” We could go on all day.

It’s existential with this guy. He wants it all. He won’t take “No.” And there can be only one.

He understands that and fights that way. He was arrested for disrupting a House meeting, but got handled with kid gloves and only issued a citation. Those of us who aren’t useful to Democrats can see what “obstruction of an official proceeding” and conspiracy charges can result in when the government wants to press charges.

And as long as there can be no peace between our people, note he’s a Venezuelan immigrant (making great money in speaking fees here) who opted to leave a corrupt Marx-inspired tyranny and mandate the same “gun control” edicts on his adoptive home as are imposed in the land he fled.

Sorry, but this is where sympathy gets replaced with resolve. When you take it out on me and mine by going after what is ours and not yours, you invite being repelled as certainly as any other criminal, tyrant wannabe, or political swindler. Hands off the Second Amendment!

The same goes for the OAS and its Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, both of which have no authority, legal, moral, or otherwise, to impose their diktats and override “the supreme Law of the Land.”

Like the UN, they presuppose rights come from the government, as opposed to being preexisting. Their “American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man,” with “rights” others are forced to provide, and “duties” (“to obey the law, to serve the community and the nation, to pay taxes”), whether just or not, is a blueprint for codifying “legal” slavery.

It could be argued that the OAS hand in opening the Darien Region in Panama (now being overrun by hordes from its member states on their way to the U.S.) ensures continued lawlessness and human rights violations, and the continued unchecked invasion and attack on U.S. sovereignty guarantees that when it comes to armed violence, we — and they — ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

They want to play hardball, let’s.

Per the Congressional Research Service, “The United States hosts the OAS headquarters in Washington, DC, and is the largest financial contributor to the organization, providing an estimated $53.2 million in FY2023… The 118th Congress is now considering the Biden Administration’s FY2024 budget request, which includes $42.6 million for the U.S. assessed contribution to the OAS and $8.0 million in voluntary contributions for OAS-managed democracy promotion and economic development programs in the hemisphere.”

Per the Constitution, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,” and the House is now under the nominal control of the Republicans, who largely owe their majority to their gun owner constituents.

There’s room for pressure there. Demand they apply it.

The Lawsuit for Survival video follows, asking the non sequitur question “Does someone else’s ‘right’ to a gun outweigh your right to live?” Note on YouTube it says “Comments have been turned off.”


About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

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Army Ammunition Factory Tied to Mass Shootings Faces New Scrutin

Army Ammunition Factory Tied to Mass Shootings Faces New Scrutiny

An agreement between the Army and one of the nation’s largest ammunition manufacturers is receiving new scrutiny because of a little-known provision allowing a government facility to produce hundreds of millions of rounds for the retail market.

Over more than a decade, contracts between the Pentagon and a series of private companies have permitted an Army site, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, to become one of the world’s largest commercial suppliers of cartridges for AR-15-style guns.

Built during World War II near Kansas City, Mo., to supply the U.S. military, the plant has in recent years directed a majority of its production toward the commercial market, including sales to retailers, law enforcement agencies and foreign governments.

A New York Times investigation published this month traced rounds from Lake City to a dozen mass shootings and many other crimes across the country since 2012.

After the Times article, several members of Congress questioned the benefits of the Army’s arrangement with Olin Winchester, the current contractor, and demanded more information from the Army.

In a letter to the Army Secretary on Friday, Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California, said that “federal subsidies may be artificially increasing the availability of ammunition in the civilian marketplace and contributing to serious violence by private citizens.”

The letter continued, “This raises serious questions about the role the Department of the Army has played in subsidizing the firearms industry and the level of oversight that the Department has exercised in supporting the plant’s operations.”

Mr. Garcia cited The Times’s reporting, as well as a subsequently published Bloomberg article about Lake City.

Another Democratic member of the House, Betty McCollum of Minnesota, also expressed concern about “the disturbing use” of Lake City ammunition in mass shootings.

“More questions need to be asked and answered about how this ammunition is being marketed to the American public,” she said in a statement. “I will be requesting a briefing from the Army on how the contracts are issued at this plant.”

While the Army has been public about the production of commercial ammunition at Lake City, it has obfuscated the scale, arguing that the information is confidential and can be released only by the contractor. That secrecy has prevented substantive public oversight of the contract.

The Army says that the arrangement, which requires contractors to maintain the ability to produce around 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition a year, is vital for national security and has saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The Pentagon has invested more than $860 million in improving and maintaining the plant over the past two decades, The Times reported earlier.

The Times investigation found that Lake City rounds, which are typically stamped with the plant’s initials, “LC,” were used in massacres including at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.; a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; a high school in Parkland, Fla.; and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. They have also turned up in a variety of other criminal investigations, from robberies to the murder of police officers. Authorities have seized the rounds from drug dealers, biker gangs, violent felons and rioters at the U.S. Capitol.

Earlier this month Mr. Garcia, along with Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, introduced a bill aimed at putting more controls on ammunition sales — which are largely unregulated — by requiring sellers to obtain a federal license and to conduct background checks on buyers. It would also limit bulk sales of ammunition and prevent so-called straw purchases, in which a buyer with a clean record turns around and sells to someone else.

In a statement, Ms. Warren criticized the Lake City contract and called for “meaningful oversight” by Congress.

“It’s unconscionable for the U.S. government to be in the business of making military-grade ammunition to sell to civilians,” she said.

The revelations have also drawn outrage from gun control advocates and families of shooting victims.

Fred Guttenberg, the father of a high school student killed in Parkland, Fla., wrote on social media, “To learn Lake City Rounds like this were possibly used to kill my daughter & the sale may have been subsidized by the US Govt is hard to comprehend.”

The post Army Ammunition Factory Tied to Mass Shootings Faces New Scrutiny appeared first on New York Times.

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The Trace Interviews Less-Lethal Gun Maker by Claiming Story is for Tech Magazine by Lee Williams

Byrna Technologies, Inc.
Byrna Technologies, Inc.

The Trace – former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory – has proven once again it is completely devoid of ethics and reliable only as a source of fake news.

The Trace wants the public to believe it’s an actual newsroom comprised of actual journalists. It calls itself “The only newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence.” Staffers refer to themselves as journalists, rather than anti-gun activists who are paid by Bloomberg to create his propaganda. The Trace and Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety even share the same president, John Feinblatt.

A Trace story published Thursday titled “Shoot, Don’t Kill,” extolls the benefits of less-than-lethal technology by examining several weapons made by Byrna Technologies, Inc., which use a 12-gram CO2 cartridge to launch .68 caliber projectiles at approximately 330 feet-per-second.

“Users can also opt for ammo loaded with tear gas or oleoresin capsicum, an extract of hot peppers, which can induce nausea, difficulty breathing, and a terrible burning in the throat, lungs, and eyes,” the story states.

The Trace story quotes Byrna’s founder, president and chief executive officer, Bryan Ganz. However, on Friday, Ganz told the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project that he had never even heard of the Trace until the story appeared Thursday morning. The freelance writer who wrote the story claimed it would appear in a different publication.

“Originally, he said it was supposed to be published in Wired magazine,” Ganz said Friday. “But once we gave him the quotes, we had no control over where the article was published.”

The story was written by Ted Alcorn, who describes himself in the story as an “independent journalist whose reporting has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.” Alcorn’s bio also shows he was “the founding research director of Everytown for Gun Safety and a policy analyst in the New York City mayor’s office.”

Until he saw it Thursday morning, Ganz had no idea his story would appear on one of the leading websites of the gun ban industry.

“Our attitude is that the more people who discuss it, the better, I guess,” Ganz said.

Alcorn used a bit too much editorial license and took things a bit too far, Ganz said, especially when he implied that gun owners would somehow realize that their firearms were “problematic” and switch to his weapons for their reduced lethality.

“It’s easy to see why gun owners might perceive a less lethal offering as an admission that traditional guns are problematic. But over the last century, the primary use of firearms has changed,” the story states. “Lethality was essential when they were mainly tools for hunting animals or national defense, but now nearly three-quarters of people who own guns say they do so for self-protection against other humans.”

“I never said anything like that,” Ganz said. “I support the Second Amendment, and I’ve carried concealed for years. I’ve been a gun owner my entire life.”


About Lee Williams

Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.

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All About Guns Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" You have to be kidding, right!?!

Gretchen Carlson’s Ignorant Tweet About the AR-15 Sets the Internet Ablaze By Nick Arama

(Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)
The ignorance of people on the left about guns is sometimes mind-boggling.

Joe Biden has said some real whoppers, including that a bullet from an AR-15 “blows up inside the body.”

Ben Shapiro made a post that highlighted some of that cluelessness from Joe Biden. It’s just astonishing how Biden sits in such a position of power and is always spouting off about guns yet knows next to nothing. He attacked “semi-automatic weapons,” saying they had no socially redeeming value — without realizing that most everyday handguns are semi-automatic. The people who protect him every day carry them, but that’s allowed because Joe is special. You ordinary Americans would not allowed to protect yourselves with those same weapons if Joe Biden had his way.

But what added to the overall ignorance was “journalist” Gretchen Carlson’s response to Shapiro’s post about the AR-15. Carlson has worked for CBS and Fox, yet that doesn’t mean that she knows anything. This may be one of the dumbest posts about the AR-15 that you’re likely to see.

“Ordinary people didn’t have AR-15s before 2004,” Carlson claimed.

“They’re not some time-honored American tradition, they’re a recent mistake that we could fix and save thousands of lives in the process.”

Oh my, how wrong can you be?

Carlson got whacked with a Community Note pointing out how wrong she was about people not having such guns before 2004: “For more than a half-century, the AR-15 has been popular among gun owners, widely available in gun stores and, for many years, even appeared in the Sears catalog.”

Indeed, it’s been available to civilians since it was made in 1959.

Yes, Gretchen, the right to bear arms is a “time-honored American tradition” (in addition to being a protected Constitutional right). You don’t get to decide what guns people can and cannot have, particularly when you, like Joe Biden, don’t have any idea what you are talking about.

The perception of the AR-15 is manipulated by the liberal obsession with it and their fixation on mass shootings. But as a percentage of those who are killed with guns, rifles are a very small percentage, and AR-15s are a percentage of that percentage. So this fixation is not based in reality, it’s based on the belief that somehow the AR-15 is some evil weapon/machine gun that can kill more people faster, without understanding it’s a rifle that fires one bullet per trigger pull. The AR-15 is also one of the most popular rifles in the country, with millions in circulation. But let not reality interfere with leftist propaganda, it’s about “Alinsky-izing” the rifle.

Carlson’s post went viral because it was so incredibly bad. The internet let her have it with a huge ratio.

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Breaking: Nationwide Pistol Brace Injunction Issued!

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Federal appeals court upholds Illinois semiautomatic weapons ban By John O’Connor

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld Illinois‘ prohibition on high-power semiautomatic weapons, refusing to put a hold on the law adopted in response to the mass killing of seven people at a 2022 parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

A three-judge panel of the 7th District U.S. Court of Appeals voted 2-1 on the issue.

The majority recognized a difference between firearms for personal use and those the state law reserves for “trained professionals,” semiautomatic weapons, including the popular AR-15.

“There is a long tradition, unchanged from the time when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, supporting a distinction between weapons and accessories designed for military or law-enforcement use and weapons designed for personal use,” Judge Diane Wood said in the opinion. “The legislation now before us respects and relies on that distinction.”

Ed Sullivan, a lobbyist for the Illinois State Rifle Association, said gun-rights advocates were not surprised by the decision, given the court’s political makeup, though only one of the three judges was appointed by a Democratic president. Sullivan said it’s likely that plaintiffs in one or more of the multiple cases consolidated in Friday’s opinion would seek a U.S. Supreme Court review, where he predicted victory.

At least eight other states and the District of Columbia have some sort of prohibition on semiautomatic weapons.

The law, adopted by a lame-duck session of the Legislature in January,  prohibits the possession, manufacture or sale of semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2024.

Known as the Protect Illinois Communities Act, it bans dozens of specific brands or types of rifles and handguns, .50-caliber guns, attachments and rapid-firing devices. No rifle will be allowed to accommodate more than 10 rounds, with a 15-round limit for handguns.

Those who own such guns and accessories when the law was enacted have to register them, including serial numbers, with the Illinois State Police. That process began Oct. 1.

The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the law on a 4-3 decision in August.

“The Protect Illinois Communities Act is a commonsense law that will keep Illinoisans safe,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a statement. “Despite constant attacks by the gun lobby that puts ideology over people’s lives, here in Illinois we have stood up and said ‘no more’ to weapons of war on our streets.”

Gun rights advocates have argued that it’s illogical to define semiautomatic guns as only suitable for the military. They say there are myriad reasons a homeowner would choose to protect family and property with an AR-15 as opposed to a handgun. And such semiautomatic weapons are the choice of many gun owners for sport shooting and hunting, they say.

Further, they note protections the U.S. Supreme Court issued in  its June 2022 decision in a case known as Bruen for guns in “common use.” The AR-15 is one, they say, given the millions in U.S. households today. But the court noted that the gun’s popularity rocketed when the 10-year federal assault-weapon ban expired in 2004.

“Most of the AR-15s now in use were manufactured in the past two decades,” Wood wrote. “Thus, if we looked to numbers alone, the federal ban would have been constitutional before 2004 but unconstitutional thereafter.”

The House sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Bob Morgan, a Democrat from the Chicago suburb of Deerfield who attended the Highland Park 4th of July parade where the deadly shooting occurred, praised the decision and joined Pritzker in calling for congressional action.

“This law has already prevented the sales of thousands of assault weapons and high capacity magazines in Illinois, making our state safer,” Morgan said. “We must renew our calls for a nationwide ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines in order to make mass shootings a thing of the past.”

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Who can have their Second Amendment rights taken away? SCOTUS may now decide

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Supreme Court will hold oral argument in U.S. v. Rahimi on Tuesday. The case involves the constitutionality of a federal law that criminalizes firearm possession by an individual subject to a domestic violence restraining order.

Rahimi is one of a slew of federal court decisions applying the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment precedent of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which requires that any statutory firearm restriction be consistent “with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Bruen didn’t change the Supreme Court’s preexisting position that the Second Amendment fully covers only “ordinary” or “responsible,” “law-abiding citizens,” as set out in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). It’s time for the court to tell us what those words mean.

Zackey Rahimi was subjected to a restraining order after being found in a civil proceeding to be “a credible threat to the physical safety of [an] intimate partner.” He was then indicted solely because he possessed a firearm while subject to the restraining order.

The statute under which Rahimi was indicted thus eliminates an individual’s right to bear arms based on a finding in a civil proceeding, as opposed to some criminal process. This is constitutionally problematic, particularly because the due process protections that attach to a criminal proceeding are far higher than those attached to a civil proceeding.

A thornier question is whether Rahimi even qualifies as an “ordinary, law-abiding citizen,” entitled to full Second Amendment protection. The Supreme Court has previously suggested that “ordinary” and “law-abiding” simply refer to the government’s historical authority to strip felons of their Second Amendment rights. It’s not clear whether this interpretation holds up in light of Bruen, however.

Before Bruen, federal courts evaluating the constitutionality of a sidearm regulation could engage in a “means-end” analysis, through which the social policy goals of the regulation could be weighed against the burden it imposed on an individual’s Second Amendment rights. Under Bruen, however, in order to establish a firearm regulation’s constitutionality, the government must point to “historical precedent from before, during, and even after the founding [that] evinces a comparable tradition of regulation” — a “well-established and representative historical analogue.”

Applying Bruen, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Rahimi’s conviction, striking down the domestic violence law as unconstitutional. Under Bruen, that outcome seems correct, at least at first blush. The U.S. just doesn’t have a historical tradition of regulating firearm possession in a way that absolutely denies Second Amendment rights to individuals based on civil proceedings.

But the Fifth Circuit also recognized that the U.S. does have such a tradition when it comes to merely curtailing Second Amendment rights, especially in the case of provably dangerous individuals. At common law, an individual could demand a “surety of the peace” against any person that the individual could show was a threat to him. Many early U.S. jurisdictions codified that tradition in statutory law, often by requiring reckless individuals to post bonds in order to secure full entitlement to rights under the Second Amendment.

Rahimi seems to fit that bill. At the time of his indictment, he had multiple state charges for violent crimes pending against him related to no fewer than five shootings between December 2020 and January 2021. One shooting came in reaction to a minor car accident; another after his friend’s credit card was declined at a restaurant.

But Rahimi wasn’t a felon at that point, as he hadn’t been convicted yet for any of those shootings. And the Fifth Circuit interpreted the qualifiers “ordinary” and “law-abiding” to exclude from full Second Amendment coverage only felons or classes of individuals “whose disarmament the Founders ‘presumptively’ tolerated or would have tolerated” in order to preserve public order (insurrectionists, for example). That reasoning — entitling Rahimi to full Second Amendment protection because he is not a felon — is problematic under Bruen.

The first federal law allowing for disarmament of felons dates to 1938. In other words, there doesn’t appear to be a strong Founding-era historical tradition that supports the notion that a felony conviction should be the line at which an individual becomes excluded from the “ordinary, law-abiding citizens” fully covered by the Second Amendment. That line thus seems inconsistent with the “historical analogue” command of Bruen, and the justices must now consider whether that line makes sense insofar as it seems to entitle individuals like Rahimi to the full protection of the Second Amendment.

A suspected domestic abuser with a demonstrated history of recklessly discharging firearms is a threat to public order. He probably shouldn’t be entitled to the full protection of the Second Amendment. The justices can now refine Bruen to tolerate that outcome by clarifying the meaning of “ordinary, law-abiding citizen,” irrespective of how they rule on the domestic violence law’s constitutionality.

Their finding could guide legislatures in crafting sensible firearm regulations, akin to historical surety laws, which comply with Bruen but curtail Second Amendment protections for demonstrably dangerous individuals, even if they haven’t yet been convicted of felonies.

Alex Talel is an attorney who served as law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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GOA’s Injunction Against ATF’s Pistol Brace Rule Extended Until Case Is Settled by John Crump

The MCX pistol with folding brace is super compact and easy to carry. IMG Jim Grant

Gun Owners of America’s (GOA) preliminary injunction against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) rule on pistol stabilizing devices (Final Rule 2021R-08F) has been extended until the conclusion of the case.

The case, State of Texas v. ATF, was bought by GOA, Gun Owners Foundation (GOF), and the state of Texas to challenge the ATF rule that reversed years of determinations surrounding pistols equipped with stabilizing devices. The ATF’s new rule reclassified most pistols with stabilizing braces to short-barreled rifles (SBRs), meaning the firearms would be regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA). It required owners of these guns to register the firearms with the ATF, submit to additional background checks, hand over passport pictures, and provide fingerprints.

The rule set off a flurry of lawsuits asking for a nationwide injunction before the June 1, 2023, effective date. Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) would get an injunction in a Texas District Court. Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) would get their injunction from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. GOA’s injunction would also come from a Texas District Court—none of the injunctions applied to all gun owners. Only the members of the organizations were covered. The injunctions were issued before the cut-off date.

The injunctions would be used as stop gaps until later to give the courts time to rule on the cases. Judge Drew B. Tipton has now decided to extend the preliminary injunction until the case is settled.

A preliminary injunction is an “extraordinary remedy” to maintain the status quo. Several factors have to be considered for an injunction to be issued.

The first and most important factor is the likelihood of the plaintiffs to succeed on the merits of the case. Judge Tipton cited the ruling in Mock v. Garland, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the ATF violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) by pulling a bait and switch with the Proposed Rule and the Final Rule.

The ATF presented a rule with a form (ATF Form 4999) with a point system to determine if a brace would turn a pistol into an SBR. When the Final Rule was unveiled, the point system was gone. All braces currently on the market would turn any pistol into an SBR if equipped. The rule bore no resemblance to the Proposed Rule.

“The first inquiry is whether a Plaintiff that has standing has established a substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits. Id. The Fifth Circuit has already decided “that the Final Rule fails the logical-outgrowth test and violates the APA.” Mock, 75 F.4th at 578. Because that holding pertained to the ATF’s rulemaking process, any plaintiff challenging the Final Rule on APA grounds in the Fifth Circuit has the same likelihood of success. Therefore, Plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood to succeed on the merits of their logical-outgrowth claim,” Judge Tipton wrote in his 29-page decision.

The judge also believes the plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if the Court doesn’t issue an injunction. Judge Tipton pointed out that the plaintiffs would be forced to comply with ATF’s rule if no injunction is issued, meaning they would have to get rid of or modify their firearms.

“The ATF gave affected gun owners until May 31, 2023, to register their stabilizing braces. 88 Fed. Reg. at 6570. Because that deadline has now passed, complying with the Final Rule would require the private Plaintiffs to do one of four things: (1) permanently modify their weapon to remove it from the scope of the NFA, (2) dispose of or ‘alter’ their stabilizing brace so that it can never be reattached, (3) turn over their weapon to the ATF, or (4) destroy their weapon completely,” the order reads.

The final factor in a preliminary injunction is the balance of equities and public interest. In this stage, the judge explores the harm to the plaintiff if an injunction is not issued. The judge also looks to the harm caused to the defendant if an injunction is issued. The judge will then look at the public interest.

The judge ruled that the plaintiff would experience harm immediately without an injunction. He said the ATF’s harm is more administrative and speculative. Judge Tipton also ruled that “there is no public interest in the perpetuation of unlawful agency action.”

“The Court finds that the balance of equities tips in Plaintiffs favor because the Final Rule’s effect on Plaintiffs is immediate and imminent while the effect on Defendants, especially the ATF, is more administrative and speculative. Defendants’ arguments of harm to the public are unavailing,” the judge wrote.

The judge kept the scope of the ruling just to GOA members. This decision means that all GOA members will be protected from ATF enforcement actions over braced pistols for the foreseeable future. Even though there is no all-encompassing order enjoining the ATF from taking enforcement action against anyone who owns a pistol equipped with a stabilizing brace, the scale of the current injunctions means millions of Americans are protected from ATF action. Since none of the groups are required to share their membership rolls with the ATF, many believe the rule is currently unenforceable.

The ATF Final Rule on the classification of pistols equipped with stabilizing braces is not dead yet, but it is on life support.

GOA’s Injunction Against The ATF’s Pistol Brace Rule Extended Until The Case Is Settled by AmmoLand Shooting Sports News on Scribd