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Second Amendment Roundup: The Supreme Court stays vacatur of ATF regulations.
The 5th Circuit finds plaintiffs likely to succeed in challenging another set of ATF rules that implicate the Second Amendment.
On August 8, the Supreme Court issued an order staying an order by a district court in Texas, which the Fifth Circuit had affirmed, vacating new ATF regulations that expand the definition of "firearm" beyond what Congress enacted in the Gun Control Act (GCA). Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh would have denied the application for a stay.
The Fifth Circuit has also reversed an order denying a preliminary injunction against a different set of ATF regulations on the grounds that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits. The Fifth Circuit temporarily enjoined the regulations to allow the district court to consider the other preliminary injunction factors.
ATF adopted two final rules in 2022. In the first, ATF expanded the definition of "firearm" far beyond that enacted by Congress. In the second, ATF expanded the definition of "rifle" beyond that in the National Firearms Act (NFA) to include configurations that it previously deemed not to be rifles. Both of these new regulations increase ATF's grip on both the firearm industry and consumers, exposing them to a wider net of criminal prohibitions under the GCA and NFA.
The Fifth Circuit put the brakes on both sets of regulations. While the primary issue in both cases is whether ATF has power to expand the definitions set by Congress, the Second Amendment keeps gurgling below the surface. Here's the backstory.
On June 30, 2023, in Vanderstok v. Garland, the U.S. District Court (N.D. Tex.) found the following definitions in ATF's Final Rule invalid and vacated the Rule:
- The GCA defines "firearm" to include "the frame or receiver thereof," which by ordinary meaning is a complete structure, onto which the barrel and other parts are assembled. ATF expands "frame or receiver" to include "a partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver, including a frame or receiver parts kit, that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function as a frame or receiver."
- The GCA defines "firearm" to include a weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or may be readily converted to shoot a projectile by action of an explosive. ATF expands that definition to include weapon parts kits that are "designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive."
On July 24, the Fifth Circuit found that ATF is not likely to prevail on the merits of its appeal and thus denied its motion to stay the vacatur order with respect to these provisions of the Rule.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then applied to the Supreme Court for a stay of the vacatur, which was temporarily issued. Both sides filed briefs.
While most of the briefing concerns whether the agency had authority to expand the definitions enacted by Congress, VanDerStok also argues that the doctrine of constitutional avoidance counsels a narrow reading of ATF's authority to manipulate the definition of "firearm" to avoid Second Amendment concerns. The right to have arms implies the right to acquire arms, which includes making them oneself. Applying N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen, there is no historical tradition of regulating privately made firearms.
The government replies that no Second Amendment issue is raised: "The Rule does not prohibit anyone from possessing a firearm or making one at home; instead, it merely confirms that those engaged in 'commercial sale[s]' of weapon parts kits and covered frames and receivers must abide by the Act's longstanding and uncontroversial serialization, background-check, and recordkeeping requirements."
On August 4, Justice Alito issued a stay to extend until August 8. As noted, five Justices then voted to extend the stay pending final disposition of the case.
ATF's second Final Rule concerns stabilizing braces that attach to handguns. The brace attaches to one's wrist, which according to its designer, enables a disabled or weaker person to hold a large handgun, such as an AR-15 type pistol. In 2012 and periodically thereafter, ATF approved the brace as an accessory that does not change the handgun's classification.
The NFA defines a "rifle," inter alia, as a weapon made, designed, and intended to be fired from the shoulder. Purporting to improve on the statutory definition, in 2021 ATF proposed a regulation under which, using a point system of features, most pistols with braces would become rifles with barrels under 16″ in length, requiring the registration thereof under the NFA. But in the Final Rule adopted in 2022, ATF scrapped the point system as too confusing and adopted an even vaguer list of general characteristics under which a pistol with a brace is a short-barreled rifle.
On August 1, in Mock v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that ATF's Final Rule on pistol braces likely is invalid and temporarily enjoined its enforcement. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires notice and comment for proposed regulations, but the final regulation here bore no relation to the original proposal. Not to mention that the rule is hopelessly vague. So the court issued a temporary preliminary injunction against its enforcement (to last 60 days) and remanded the case back to the district court for that court to reconsider the preliminary injunction motion with likelihood of success decided in the plaintiffs' favor.
However, instead of a nationwide injunction, enforcement is only enjoined against the specific plaintiffs, their customers, and members (including members of the Firearms Policy Coalition). The court said that it is "uncertain how many persons are now subject to these injunctions or how the ATF would enforce the Final Rule against non-enjoined parties." ATF estimated that three to seven million pistols with braces were in circulation, but I'm advised that only 250,000 owners registered them under the NFA.
To date, Garland has not filed an application with the Supreme Court to vacate the injunction; it may be that Garland will not do so given its limited duration.
Concurring in Mock, Judge Don R. Willett wrote: "Rearward attachments, besides making a pistol less concealable, improve a pistol's stability, and thus a user's accuracy. Accuracy, in turn, promotes safety. Even for attachments that convert a pistol into a rifle under the statutes, ATF has not identified any historical tradition of requiring ordinary citizens to endure a lengthy, costly, and discretionary approval process just to use accessories that make an otherwise lawful weapon safer."
Citing Bruen, Judge Willett added that "making common, safety-improving modifications to otherwise lawfully bearable arms" is likely protected by the Second Amendment. He continued: "Adding a rearward attachment—whether as a brace or a stock—makes the pistol more stable and the user more accurate." Of course, if it's actually a shoulder stock, it would be a short-barreled rifle (SBR) under the NFA. Without going into the issue here, SBRs were included in the NFA in 1934 virtually by accident, not because they were "gangster" weapons.
Judge Stephen A. Higginson dissented from the Mock decision. Aside from the APA issues, Judge Higginson made it a point to deny that braces offer "safety-improving modifications." He quoted a plurality of the Supreme Court as having observed that the object of the NFA "was to regulate certain weapons likely to be used for criminal purposes," and "the regulation of short-barreled rifles … addresses a concealable weapon likely to be so used." That was from Thompson/Center Arms v. U.S. (1992), a case I argued and won against ATF that strictly construed the NFA definition of an SBR not to include certain configurations in that classification. (As a fact, SBRs are rarely used in crime.)
Judge Higginson next suggested that SBRs are "dangerous and unusual" weapons that have no Second Amendment protection. Moreover, nothing is banned under the NFA, which only imposes taxation and registration requirements. He stated that the NFA is akin to the "shall-issue" handgun licensing systems that Bruen approved in its footnote 9.
Lastly, Judge Higginson opined that the NFA registration scheme had been upheld in U.S. v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court's most misunderstood Second Amendment case. Actually, Miller only said that it couldn't take judicial notice that a short-barreled shotgun was ordinary military ordnance and remanded the case to the district court to resolve that issue. If it was, then by implication it was protected by the Second Amendment. But if the NFA requirements would be valid as applied to a constitutionally-protected arm, Miller would have just said so. But it didn't.
Nothing came of the Miller remand, because Jack Miller had been murdered by then and his co-defendant Frank Layton copped a plea.
The bottom line: the Fifth Circuit's decision in VanDerStok that ATF's regulations on "firearms" are likely invalid stands, although the vacatur is stayed by the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit's decision in Mock that ATF's regulations on pistol braces are likely invalid stands, but we'll have to await Merrick Garland's potential application to the Supreme Court for a stay against the injunction thereof.
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“The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires notice and comment for proposed regulations, but the final regulation here bore no relation to the original proposal. Not to mention that the rule is hopelessly vague.”
Is the ATF even trying to conform to the law anymore? Or is it ‘lets throw it up on the wall and see which circuit it sticks the longest’?
I mean if the courts won’t hold them to the law, why would they try to conform to it? remember, liberals are not good people. They’re evil monsters who seek to destroy us. That’s why they must be destroyed first.
Maybe it’s just the hour, but the above seems overly optimistic.
So, district court, reasonably, decided that these regulations are very likely unconstitutional, and vacated enforcement. Yay!
The Fifth circuit declined to stay the vacatur on the grounds that the government was unlikely to prevail. Again, yay!
The Supreme court now stayed, if I’m reading this right, (the hour!) the vacatur. Multiple times. 5-4. And as a result, the BATF can continue enforcing these laws the district court found unconstitutional, and which subjects citizens to potential felony prosecution, during it’s appeals of the district court ruling.
Decidedly not yay.
The bright side is that if 5th circuit rules against the government AND the Court refuses cert, the stay is lifted. The dark side is that there are obviously 5 votes on the Court that seem to think the regulations probably constitutional.
The best we can say here is that the Court is pretty casual about 2nd amendment rights being violated during litigation, and people being rendered felons by a regulation flipping the legal status of their lawfully acquired property. Even if they eventually rule in favor of the 2nd amendment, they obviously don’t consider violations of it to be a really big deal.
I don’t think you can necessarily infer than there are obviously 5 votes that think the regulations are probably constitutional. More like the federal government should get basically unlimited leeway to enforce its prerogatives while the issues “percolate” in the courts.
But I agree with your second point. If they don’t consider ongoing violations to be a deal, then we’ll always lose, as once one is stayed or permanently struck down, the left will come up with another.
I suppose you’re right, it’s more a matter of a general bias against government actions being suspended during litigation, even if it seems likely they’ll eventually be struck down. The Court is very deferential to the federal government, almost all cases that strike down laws or regulations as unconstitutional are state laws, not federal.
They just don’t take seriously the rights violations, some of them irreversible, that happen during that litigation. People being forced to destroy or part with lawfully acquired property without compensation. Just from a takings standpoint, that’s wrong.
And, as this is a change in regulation, all the vacatur did was restore the status quo ante during the litigation! Not like cases where you’re challenging a long standing rule, where you might argue for staying the vacatur so the courts are not forcing a change until final judgment.
I agree. The fact that no one was reimbursed for bump stocks was an outrage. But what you said in this last reply buttresses your original point, that they don’t really care about violations in the short run, violations that are rarely imposed upon non-2A constitutional rights.
I don’t think the Bruen majority actually like the 2nd amendment, as such. They’re just too honest to be willing to spike it the way the minority wanted to.
But there’s no fire in their bellies, no urgency, about dealing with violations. They’ll do what legal reasoning dictates if confronted with such a law, and maybe even get testy over lower courts not following their precedents, but the violations just don’t outrage them.
Outside of Alito and Thomas, I agree. Of course, the three liberals actively like the violations.
In the end, judges are agents of the government, and the government doesn’t like reining itself in. Ever.
Telepathy when used on conservatives finds honesty and good faith.
The left never acts in good faith, so it’s easy
Like hoppy, I also think it remains unproven that “there are obviously 5 votes on the Court that seem to think the regulations probably constitutional”. One alternative hypothesis is that one of the 5 thought the regulation was likely unconstitutional but that sweeping national injunctions are even more unconstitutional. I can’t prove that hypothesis – or even provide much support for it. But I can’t disprove it either. Alternative hypotheses remain.
I guess we’ll see when the 5th Circuit finalizes the injunction. If SCOTUS grants cert to reverse, we’ll have our answer.
We’re dealing with a kit that has pieces which can easily be put together to form a firearm. Saying that regulating its sale as a firearm sale goes wildly beyond anything Congress ever intended to regulate when it defined a “firearm’ shows roughly the same level of legal acumen as saying that an election worker who accepts ballots with a signature off the signature line is guilty of egregious election fraud.
Fraudsters live by exploits, by exploiting others’ cognitive gaps for personal benefit. It’s understandable how their lawyers would spin things. Perhaps, just like mediocre people, they’re entitled to a little representation on the Supreme Court. But would you want them to be a majority?
The purpose of the law is to protect ordinary people. It’s not to promote and reward cleverness in criminals.
It’s like the whining that happened when the Supreme Court struck down debt peonage. The South had done an almost perfect analogy of this. They had created a kit each of whose individual pieces weren’t slavery, but which could be easily assembled together to create something that looked a whole lot like it.
Really, that’s the entire case.
Sorry, the law doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work that way. We don’t make non-crimes into crimes because what they’re doing is working around the law as written. Let’s say Congress prohibits a drug because of its psychoactive effects, and calls it out by name. Should it be illegal to use anything else that may have psychoactive effects, even if not covered by the law? Of course not. If Congress thinks people are exploiting a “loophole” in the statute, Congress is free to amend the statute. If it doesn’t, then it’s clearly okay with it. Isn’t that what SCOTUS said regarding the Voting Rights Act?
Bad analogy.
Better analogy. There’s a drug law that forbids sale of a particular drug. The DEA issues a regulation that selling two substances together that when easily mixed together, make that drug is also forbidden.
And since it’s not a gun, none of us would ever even care about the DEA doing that, let alone consider it illegal.
Again, NO. Sure, mixing = assembly, but the parts here have to be altered or they don’t go together. It’s not a kit full of parts you assemble, it’s a kit full of parts you machine to make something you can assemble.
But screw what the DEA would do, because they’re not dealing with anything you have a constitutional right to.
Your “better analogy” is in fact illegal. There are many illegal drugs that can be made with commonly-available materials. The DEA does not have the authority to unilaterally outlaw the selling of those commonly-available materials.
There is in fact caselaw on this very question. Unfortunately, neither memory nor time are sufficient to dredge up a cite right now.
I would absolutely care. To your point, I don’t know that I could get judges to strike it down, but I care that it’s beyond what they should be doing.
“Saying that regulating its sale as a firearm sale”
You clearly do NOT understand the issue here. The regulation here does not have to do with parts you simply assemble. If that were the case you’d be right.
It has to do with parts you CAN’T assemble, because they’re not finished. Where the purchaser has to finish the manufacture of the part themselves.
The seller is not manufacturing a kit you can assemble a gun from. They’re manufacturing a kit you can manufacture a gun from. The critical parts are not finished parts.
The critical issue here is that, if they can treat unfinished, non-functional parts as though they were actual firearms, based on an arbitrary judgment that finishing them would be ‘easy’? I’m a mechanical engineer with a garage full of tools; I wouldn’t dare have any metal stock on hand, because I could ‘easily’ convert it into a finished gun!
I can actually see the argument that one shouldn’t be allowed to manufacture their own firearm (whether or not it’s constitutional is another issue). But as you noted, that’s not what the statute says.
The thing is, this administration really IS working towards the end game of civilian disarmament. Biden is a gun controller going way back, and a lot more radical in that regard than anyone we’ve seen in the White house in living memory. He may mostly be a puppet in many regards, but THIS is something he’s passionate about.
They figure that, once they’ve dealt with the judiciary one way or another, the manufacturers can be brought in line fairly easily, they’re few enough in number and unavoidably are publicly identifiable, they can’t actively resist enforcement.
But it’s all for naught if the result of clamping down on the legal supply of firearms is just a massive increase in untraceable home manufacture. So it’s become a top priority for them to quash home firearms manufacture.
Personally, I’ve been studying the topic of home primer manufacture, because that’s the real weak point in the ammunition manufacture ecosystem; Bullets? Easy. Cases? Reusable, and in principle easy enough to manufacture. Powder? Easy. Primers? Only a couple manufacturers in the country, that you could cut off the supply of easy as pie.
You are literally nuts, Brett. A total paranoid.
No, he’s just a realist.
The seller is not manufacturing a kit you can assemble a gun from. They’re manufacturing a kit you can manufacture a gun from. The critical parts are not finished parts.
That’s a distinction without a difference. The government can prohibit either one, at least so long as the work needed to “manufacture/assemble” is relatively straightforward.
It is not a distinction without a difference, or else you’d not have bothered claiming that you could just assemble the kit.
And, no, the government can’t ban either one, any more than they can ban kits to make printing presses.
You say “relatively straightforward,” but relative to what? Assembling a firearm from a kit with a complete lower (already required to be serialized and have a background check) is not straightforward at all relative to just buying a gun, and finishing an 80% lower is similarly not straightforward relative to assembling an already-finished lower.
I have a 2002 letter from the ATF Firearms Technology Branch assuring me that my 1912 manufactured Mauser C96 pistol with an accurate reproduction detachable shoulder stock/holster is legally considered a 1968 Gun Control Act (Title I) Curio & Relic handgun and not a 1934 National Firearms Act (Title II) SBR short barrel rifle.
So it sounds like that letter is not worth the paper it’s printed on if the ATF decides to reverse itself and felonize me.
I want to see Congress retroactively prohibit all abortions and lock up every woman who has ever had one.
I want to see Congress retroactively require your mother to have had an abortion and lock her up for not having had one.
Plenty of bump stock owners had letters like that, too. My Hellfire trigger came with a copy of a letter from the BATF.
Here is what REALLY stinks about ACB’s cave.
The named plaintiffs had been enjoying the protection of a preliminary injunction, that blocked ATF from enforcing the regs against them while the case was pending. (Fifth Circuit had denied a stay of the injunction pending appeal, and had expedited that appeal.)
However, before the PI appeal was heard, Judge O’Connor granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs. Consistent with controlling Fifth Circuit precedent, the final remedy was an order vacating the regulations. That was broader relief than the PI, and of course a final judgment moots the preliminary injunction.
By staying the judgment pending appeal, SCOTUS now allows ATF to enforce the regs against the named plaintiffs, **even though they were successful in their lawsuit.** To put it differently, the plaintiffs are now worse off than they were before they won their lawsuit.
FPC pointed out this anomalous situation in its SCOTUS papers, and suggested that if SCOTUS was inclined to grant a stay, at the very least it should limit the stay as to everyone except the named plaintiffs, so that they could continue to enjoy protection while the case plays out. But noooooooo.
I’m not as anti-gun as many of my fellow liberals, but the outcome-oriented nonsense in these gun threads, oftentimes from those who seem into some light terrorism in other threads, is doing no one any favors.
After all yelling the lower courts were ignoring the Supreme-Court decided law, when the Supreme Court decides the law in a way you don’t like, suddenly their authority evaporates. That’s not a sustainable inconsistency, if you want to keep public support.
I don’t speak in favor of gun rights because SCOTUS said so, but because the 2nd Amendment is not ambiguous and is not open to negotiation.
I don’t care what SCOTUS says, so it’s not an inconsistency. If Thomas and Alito were to die and Peod Joe replaced them with another fat ugly Puerto Rican lesbian (oh excuse me, a “wise Latina”) and another semi-retarded ape masquerading as a woman like Ketanji, I would still say that the 2nd Amendment protects what it says.
If you’re not willing to admit when they’ve gone too far, yeah, you ARE as anti-gun as your fellow ‘liberals’, for all practical purposes.
You were part of the outrage crew over Heller, as I recall. The Supreme court struck down the most extreme outlier gun law in the entire country, and you freaked out. So don’t try retroconing yourself as a “moderate” on the subject. Nobody who freaked over Heller is a moderate on the topic of gun control.
I am aware that your aperture for people who disagree with you and yet are legitimate is quite small. There are zealots on both sides, and you are one.
You were part of the outrage crew over Heller, as I recall
Nope! I think now and thought then that there is an individual right.
I think it’s better patterned as a right to self defense via the 9th, 2nd, and general practice, but I had no real issue with Heller.
I don’t like Bruen.
So what would you have ruled in response to lower courts basically ignoring Heller by employing the “two step” test that found every single law, no matter how stupid, constitutional? Remember, in Highland Park, the 7th Circuit held that making the public FEEL safer was an important benefit that satisfied intermediate scrutiny, even if it didn’t actually make anything safer.
The basic problem with that approach, which otherwise would be appropriate, is that when it comes to firearms, or indeed a number of other really ideologically fraught topics, some courts, circuits even, apply rational basis and call it “strict scrutiny”.
So they had to be instructed in how to apply strict scrutiny, not just be directed to call whatever they felt like doing “strict scrutiny”.
Bruen is a disaster as an actually usable test. There aren’t very many historical analogues of many modern laws, and in any case Bruen instructs that courts can’t just look at whether historical analogues exist, but must assess how broadly they were adopted and such.
But the problem with the strict scrutiny approach is that except for really dumb laws like ones that target cosmetic features of guns, it’s almost always going to be met. Compelling interest in stopping gun-related crime? Yup. Narrowly tailored? So we’re balancing the effect on criminals vs non-criminals, based on highly disputable expert evidence?
That’s exactly his point. Let’s say the court says “Laws that implicate the 2nd Amendment must be reviewed with strict scrutiny.”
Then a circuit panel with three Obama judges will simply say “We declare that this law banning collapsible stocks serves a compelling state interest of reducing violence, and the plaintiffs haven’t demonstrated that the state couldn’t achieve its aims with a less restrictive law.”
If they’re going to act in bad faith, strict scrutiny doesn’t help.
Well, it’s different from just saying “strict scrutiny” and expecting the lower courts to fill in the blanks, certainly. It’s the Court’s response to massive resistance.
It’s not a “law.” It’s an executive interpretation.
But I’d be okay with a full hearing if it doesn’t take 10 months. Justice delayed is justice denied should be a real creed, not just one that applies to your pet issues of killing babies and gay sodomy.
First, this isn’t a national law. It’s a novel reinterpretation of a law. The law hasn’t changed one bit.
And all that the 5th circuit was doing was restoring the status quo until litigation was complete.
When a regulatory agency suddenly, after years and years, up and decides that a law means something nobody thought it meant, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people being converted into felons if they don’t dispose of lawfully acquired property used to exercise a civil liberty, how is this unreasonable to do?
Suppose some regulatory agency somewhere up and decided that color printers that hold more than one ream of paper were instruments of currency forgery, and by a regulatory action without any change to statutes, made possession of them a felony? Would it be unreasonable to stay the new regulation until litigation was complete?
Let’s say Congress passed a law prohibiting the Rev. Kirkland from erupting into his “husband” without protection. Would you be okay with a 6 month period while the issue was tested in the courts? Or would say that every single night that the Rev. Kirkland has to cover up is an outrageous violation of human rights?
I haven’t taken remedies, but I do know there are other factors than is the status quo maintained in granting stays.
Yeah the factor seems to be “whether it’s a rule the left likes.”
Hoppy, maybe instead of continuing to fantasize about gay sex, you should just take the plunge and actually do it. We know you’re thinking about it.
Nah, this is the real face of anti-fascism. Once you’ve identified the “fascists”, well, fascists have no rights, so do unto them before they can do unto you.
You just don’t like seeing what “antifa” looks like when the reasoning is applied by somebody who isn’t a commie.
You are quoting with approval someone so extremist and shallow no one knows if he’s a parody or not.
*Destroy liberals* based on a Supreme Court finding, Brett? That sounds like you are the bad guys.
Area man starts killing people based on what he passionately believes the Constitution says is literally terrorism.
A vague and unimplementable case like Bruen seems a pretty bad response to massive resistance. In reality the Court isn’t so dumb, and this interpretation of Bruen and the motivation behind it is based more on your feelings than reality.
I think: (1) Bruen’s test was obviously motivated by a court wanting to avoid the result of lower courts upholding gun regulations because they save lives and guns are dangerous, and (2) Bruen’s test is bound to fail, because the main reason to uphold gun regulations is if they save lives and because guns are dangerous, not because some weird historical analogy can be drawn to stuff that was done 180 years ago.
Eventually we will have to make our way back to dangerousness. I think you will see the first steps in the domestic violence case, because no way are there are 5 Supreme Court votes for the right of wife beaters to own guns to shoot their wives with.
It’s also not a constitutional case. It’s a case about whether a restriction that applies to the completed object can lawfully apply to a kit that one can assemble into the completed object in 20 minutes.
And if the product were anything other than a gun, we’d all consider the 5th Circuit’s and Judge O’Connor’s positions bats. But because it is a gun and the masculinity of conservatives is challenged, we have to pretend that a kit is totally different than the assembled object.
And no, this doesn’t violate the Second Amendment either, because the underlying laws (background checks and such) that the regulation is attempting to protect do not violate the Second Amendment.
“upholding gun regulations because they save lives and guns are dangerous,”
Assuming facts not in evidence.
Yes, background checks do violate the Second Amendment, unless you’re willing to concede that the government can charge you to run a background check before you blast off into your “husband’s” anus.
“a kit that one can assemble into the completed object in 20 minutes.”
Again, no, a kit that you have to do machining on before you can do the assembly.
You can debate how much machining is necessary before a partially completed receiver should count as a receiver for legal purposes. I think it would be fair to say that if all you had to do was break off a strategically located tab, that’s a bit too complete.
But this administration is pushing things more in the direction of a raw billet being a “receiver” if you tell the person how to make it into one.
Your reading comprehension is in the basement if you think that was “with approval”; Do you think I LIKE the Antifa?
He’s reasoning the exact same way they do, he’s just not doing it from a left-wing starting point. So, he’s not ‘fascist”, he’s anti-fascist. He’s just a right wing version of the dudes who show up in masks and body armor all the time, and set stuff on fire.
Try not tolerating them for a change, and I’ll take your complaints about him seriously.
Those facts are very much in evidence, and gun rights enthusiasts look like liars when they dispute them.
They also are trying to require that all parts be serialized. I got into an argument with some idiot at the USPS who told me that I couldn’t ship a pistol slide because it’s a gun…
Your “evidence” is completely subjective. In any case, the purpose of the Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is to limit the power of the federal government, and since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, that of the States as well. “Dangerousness” is completely subjective and could be used to justify almost any infringement upon any individual liberty (see the controversy over Free Speech). The Administrative State wants to maintain and expand its power and reach, its denizens regard ordinary armed citizen as a threat to their own status and livelihood, and will use any excuse to attempt to curtail individual rights under the Second Amendment.
No, they’re really not. You haven’t demonstrated that any of the “common sense gun laws” would reduce crime at all, much less materially.
“Bruen is a disaster as an actually usable test. There aren’t very many historical analogues of many modern laws,”
That’s not because it’s a lousy test. It’s because, during the relevant era, there wasn’t a major push on to infringe the right in question. The modern laws are a product of hostility towards the right among people in a position to pass laws, exactly the sort of thing having a bill of rights is supposed to get in the way of.
” Narrowly tailored? So we’re balancing the effect on criminals vs non-criminals, based on highly disputable expert evidence?”
How exactly can you claim the government has a compelling interest in mildly inconveniencing criminals, and a law that interferes with a constitutionally protected right is “narrowly tailored” when the innocent people it effects wildly outnumber the criminals it inconveniences?
I suppose a law mandating that printer magazines only hold five sheets of paper would, by your standard, meet a compelling interest in fighting counterfeiting, as it would really slow down counterfeiters if they had to keep reloading the printer. And would be narrowly tailored, because, who cares if almost everybody inconvenienced wasn’t a counterfeiter to begin with?
You may not like antifa, but you don’t call ‘Destroy liberals’ antifa, you call it “the real face of anti-fascism.”
Which sounds a lot like approval to me.
Which just establishes that you’re deaf.