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Federal judge expands block on Biden’s “ghost gun” rules

March 10, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Homemade firearms have been around since before this nation was a nation. They’re a way of life and have been for ages. Today, though, such firearms are called “ghost guns” and are treated like some kind of grand scourge.

It’s the pretext the Biden administration needed to step in and try to restrict these “ghost gun” kits that make it easier for law-abiding citizens to make their own guns.

And now the administration has yet another setback on that front.

The ATF can no longer enforce its unfinished-gun-parts ban against one of the foremost makers of homemade firearm kits.

Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday extending protections against the government’s new regulations on homemade gun parts to Defense Distributed. The ATF can no longer implement its rule in regard to the company or its customers. The judge found those rules, proposed at the request of President Joe Biden (D.), are likely unconstitutional and cause an undue burden on the parts maker.

Judge O’Connor wrote in VanDerStok v. Garland that “[t]he Government’s likely ultra vires enforcement efforts upset decades of ATF regulatory precedent against a public that has relied on that historic posture” and “the liberty interests of law-abiding citizens wishing to engage in historically lawful conduct (dealing in now-regulated parts)—which Defense Distributed shares—outweighs the Government’s competing interest in preventing prohibited persons from unlawfully possessing firearms.”

The decision adds the company, which has been at the forefront of 3D-printed, home-machined gun designs, and litigation over both for years, to a small list of other manufacturers that O’Connor has exempted from the rule. While a different federal judge previously denied an attempt by gun-rights advocates and Republican Attorneys General to have the rule blocked on Second Amendment grounds, Judge O’Connor has found Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation’s argument the ATF overstepped its authority under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The ruling is another blow to President Biden’s efforts to unilaterally tighten gun regulations through ATF rulemaking rather than legislation. It comes just a few weeks after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the agency’s bump-stock ban violated the APA. Both decisions foreshadow potential legal troubles for Biden’s other major gun rule: the pistol-brace ban.

This, of course, is very good news, in part because each setback for the Biden administration and the ATF in the courts is a win for the Second Amendment, and not just on the “ghost gun” issue, but all of it.

Let’s make no mistake, all of these rules are, in fact, an infringement on the Second Amendment, especially in light of the Bruen decision. There is no likelihood of a late 18th-century/early 19th-century law restricting the sale of parts that could be turned into a gun, for one thing, nor does the bump stock ban conform to the NFA’s definition of a machine gun.

In all of these cases, the ATF has overstepped its authority, generally at the behest of the White House. It doesn’t matter whose butt is in the seat in the Oval Office, any infringement is unconstitutional, based on the plain text of the Second Amendment.

These more than qualified under that principle.

The downside here is that this isn’t a permanent thing. Not with “ghost guns” or any of the rest. The fight on this is far from over, which means advocates will need to gear up for additional efforts. Most of those will be in the courts, where grassroots activism will hold little sway, but the organizations challenging such laws will need support.

In time, maybe we’ll finally convince the gun control crowd that the Constitution isn’t on their side no matter how much they try to willfully misread it. Probably not, but we can dream.

Filed Under: <![CDATA[federal court]]>, <![CDATA[ghost guns]]>, <![CDATA[Gun Control]]>, <![CDATA[Guns]]>, <![CDATA[homemade firearms]]>, Bearing Arms, News

Florida’s age restriction on gun sales upheld by federal appeals court

March 10, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

The state of Florida has a reputation as being fairly pro-gun, a reputation that may well be burnished should it pass constitutional carry.

Yet in the aftermath of the Parkland massacre, the state went a different direction.

Lawmakers, amid public outcry, passed a number of gun control measures such as red flag laws and an age restriction on long gun sales.

The age restriction was a particularly egregious law, one that sparked a lawsuit by the NRA.

On Thursday, a federal court upheld the law.

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday upheld a Florida law barring people under age 21 from buying a gun, rejecting a challenge by the National Rifle Association gun rights lobby group.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law was in line with the historical tradition of gun regulation in the United States, meeting a new standard for gun control laws set by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

Wait…really?

Yep.

The 11th Circuit panel decided on Thursday that this one was, pointing to more than a dozen 19th century state laws barring people under 21 from buying guns.

Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who wrote the ruling, said that while those laws did not go back to the nation’s founding, they were relevant because they were passed around the time that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment was adopted, which extended the Second Amendment to state laws.

Two of judges on the panel were appointed by Democratic presidents and one by a Republican.

Now, this is a concern for me. As a I recall, Bruen explicitly directs the courts to consider laws in existence at the time of the nation’s founding, not around the time of the 14th Amendment’s passage, which was the better part of a century later in the wake of the Civil War. [Editors note- Justice Thomas acknowledge in Bruen that there is a “scholarly debate” over “whether courts should primarily rely on the prevailing understanding of an individual right when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 when defining its scope”, but added that “the public understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in both 1791 and 1868 was, for all relevant purposes, the same with respect to public carry.”]

As such, I find it difficult to believe that should this lawsuit be carried further–and the NRA will most definitely continue with this case if there’s any way they can–that this ruling won’t be overturned.

1868 and 1791 are not the same thing. The passage of the 14th Amendment may well have existed at the same time as a number of age restrictions on the sale of firearms, but it was near 80 years after the Constitution was signed and almost as long since the Second Amendment was ratified.

To say that our Founding Fathers would necessarily have approved of anything happening at that time requires at least some degree of speculation, and that’s not what Bruen laid down.

In that decision, the court notes that the only acceptable gun control is that which existed at the time of the Second Amendment’s creation since that’s the only way to determine which limits the Founders deemed acceptable.

The last time I checked, the aftermath of the Civil War was a very different time with very different attitudes.

So yeah, the court botched this. Looking at the trio, I suspect a couple of the judges twisted themselves and Bruen to justify upholding this law.

The good news is that this allows the challenge to go to the next step. In order to kill these laws nationwide, we need a Supreme Court decision. This provides a potential avenue for one.

It’s just a shame we need it.

Filed Under: <![CDATA[age restrictions]]>, <![CDATA[federal court]]>, <![CDATA[Florida]]>, <![CDATA[Gun Control]]>, <![CDATA[Guns]]>, <![CDATA[Video]]>, Bearing Arms, News

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