Quote of the Day
As the Court previously explained, the issue in this case is whether ATF may properly regulate a component as a “frame or receiver” even after ATF determines that the component in question is not a frame or receiver. It may not. Logic dictates that a part cannot be both not yet a receiver and receiver at the same time. Defendants’ reliance on that logical contradiction is fatal to their argument.
Reed O’Connor
June 30, 2023
VanDerStok v. Garland
One should not be surprised the antigun people tried doing something that did make logical sense. Logic has always been an alien concept to their type.
Those 80% receivers, at least at the Federal level, continue to be legal. At the state level please seek the advice of a firearms lawyer before you post your new build on social media.
And in case we needed reminding. That brand of stupid is endemic with communists. And if not for the courts would be applied to life’s every possible manner and circumstance. (Thank you for your donations, Joe!)
For this is not just about firearms.
It pretty much matches the logic of being able to change your gender, or that CO2 is a pollutant.
The scary part is that we only have seen the minions at work. Their masters must be the totally gone.
Logic isn’t a foreign concept here, it more like it’s been surgically removed.
To most leftists’ logic is a concept that rises up their intellectual capacity to comprehend. To most of the rest they quite simply do not care. Logic is irrelevant if it poses an obstacle to their agenda. And to the leftists in power their agenda is our total and complete disarmament. Thus, anything they do is acceptable…logical or otherwise. As long as it serves their agenda. What they are doing and why is not complicated, it’s not a secret. They don’t even TRY to hide their motivations, agendas or plans. All they need to do is keep trying and they know that EVENTUALLY they will succeed. The solution? Remove them from this mortal plane so they can’t keep trying. Nothing else will stop them.
As pointed out elsewhere: I’ve seen people celebrating that all laws restricting access to home-finishable receivers are struck down by this ruling. That is NOT the case.
The only thing this decision did is strike down the BATFE’s Final Rule on frames/receivers. No state laws were impacted.
It wasn’t even decided on 2nd Amendment grounds; the decision clearly says as much — the judge didn’t even begin to weigh the Constitutional arguments. He found that the BATFE exceeded its statutory authority when it “interpreted” the definition of “frame or receiver” — as passed by Congress (this is important) — to include items not covered by the statutory definition. That definition can be changed, but it must be changed by an Act of Congress; the BATFE does NOT have the authority to unilaterally change it themselves. Thus, the Final Rule was ruled unconstitutional.
Not because home-made firearms are protected by 2A — we know they are, but that wasn’t the question posed by the challenge — but because the BATFE simply does not have the authority to change what only Congress can change. Period. Full stop.
(Now let’s see this case’s outcome applied to the Bump Stock rule, and its unilateral expansion of the Congress-passed statutory definition of “machine gun”.)
Schrodinger’s receiver? At some quantum level a piece of metal (or plastic) could simultaneously be|not be a frame?
Or as Tam points out: 80% receivers? They sell 95% Sten receivers down at Home Depot, no background checks required!
BATFE has a history of making its regulations as vague and double-meaning as they can get away with, to cast the widest net possible. If they can make a rule that a hunk of plastic or metal can be both “a receiver” and “not a receiver”, then gun owners’ (and citizens’ in general) legal standing would be constantly subject to the whims of BATFE agents and supervisors, which is just how they like it.
After all, if a shoelace can be both “a machine gun” and “not a machine gun”, you could conceivably be arrested at any time for your footwear, depending on how the BATFE feels at the moment.
I thought of that, too! But I don’t think Congress or the ATF is smart enough to get that past the lawyers and judges. Especially when the law must be understandable by ordinary citizens.
“the law must be understandable by ordinary citizens” — yes, that would be a nice rule. Robert Heinlein proposed it in one of his short stories. But it isn’t an actual rule as far as I know.
If anything, the opposite. We’re routinely told the principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” when at the same time the Feds crank out 200 or so pages of Federal Register every day. So, in reality, no one does and no one can know what the law is, because it’s impossible to keep up with such a torrent of crap. Quite apart from the inherent power of juries to nullify (as Lysander Spooner argued so well back in 1852) that observation would make a nice supporting argument for a jury to use.