Quote of the Day
We are very excited and encouraged by the Fifth Circuit’s decision this morning. We intend to ask the court for additional information about who is covered under the injunction, but cannot stress enough just how important this decision is. The fight is far from over, but this is a huge victory in the battle against the ATF’s unconstitutional and unlawful brace rule!
Cody J. Wisniewski
Senior attorney for constitutional litigation at FPC Action Foundation.
May 24, 2023
Federal court deals blow to ATF pistol brace rule ahead of gun accessory registration deadline
The courts are slow moving but they are moving in the correct direction.
I’m rather exited about some of the polling numbers I’m seeing. For example:
It’s a biased sample, but the numbers are good enough that it at least partially makes up for the bias.
Other numbers I look at that are encouraging are the comments to news articles about gun laws. The progun side just absolutely dominates the online discussions.
I like to think the pistol brace rule has little public support for several reasons (non-inclusive list):
– It bypassed the normal lawmaking process, cutting Congress completely out of the picture.
– It aims to regulate previously-legal items under a law which contains very specific definitions — definitions the items in question simply do not meet.
– It aims to place those items under the purview of that law, after the agency said for years the items don’t fall under that law and are legal because they do not meet those definitions.
– It seeks to regulate items that are so rarely used in crime as to be statistical background noise, but are owned and used by millions of peaceable citizens for lawful purposes — and punishes non-compliance with severe criminal penalties.
On those last two, that rule seems to be doing a lot of good work in “waking up” people — gun owners and non-gun-owners alike — to the reality of bureaucratic power grabs. The naked duplicity of the BATFE (it’s legal until it’s not until it is until it’s not, or “however we feel about it today”, and to Hell with your elected representatives’ input), paired with felony-level penalties for mere possession of an accessory that contributes shockingly little to crime rates (read: the rule will not enhance public safety), added to the knowledge that any executive agency can do the exact same “rule-making”, sends a clear message to mainstream Americans:
“Your freedoms are what we say they are, until we say they’re not, and then we can throw you in jail for a decade for doing today what was perfectly legal yesterday. And there’s nothing you or your representatives can do about it.”
I don’t own a pistol brace (and I wouldn’t say so here if I did), but I hope this rule serves as a wake-up call to more and more people.
“Your freedoms are what we say they are, until we say they’re not, and then we can throw you in jail for a decade for doing today what was perfectly legal yesterday. And there’s nothing you or your representatives can do about it.”
At least they’re staying consistent with the rest of government these days.
Hopefully the courts are realizing the idea of chevron deference is a myth.
There are no government experts in any field to defer to.
The problem with Chevron, and with most other precedents, is that they have no Constitutional basis. Or to put it differently, ever since the ink on the Constitution was still damp, the courts have treated the Constitution with just as much contempt as every other politician.
Come to think of it, the notion of “precedent” is an example. It’s one thing to say that, when in doubt, one should give some weight to previous decisions on similar matters. But the notion that lower courts should obey SCOTUS rather than the Constitution is severely misguided. The right answer is that, when a SCOTUS decision violates the Constitution, all courts have a duty to set it aside and rule according to the Supreme Law of the Land, precedent be d**ned.
LOL! As if BATFEces gives a rats ass what some court says. Just like the FBI blatantly refusing to obey a congressional order the thugs at F ATF will simply ignore this ruling.