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The Biden administration and Democrats suffered major setbacks at the Supreme Court and at federal courts on Friday following a series of rulings that saw key gun control measures ruled unconstitutional.
The nation’s highest court “struck down a federal rule put in place during former President Donald Trump’s administration that prohibited bump stocks for guns, handing a major victory to Second Amendment advocates,” Just the News reported. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the devices added to semiautomatic weapons to make them fire faster do not convert weapons into prohibited machine guns.
“This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machinegun.’ We hold that it does not,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion.
The ban was implemented in the wake of a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 at a country music festival during which more than 50 people were killed and more than 500 wounded. The shooter fired at the crowd from a room at the nearby MGM Grand hotel. The justices ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives overstepped its authority in imposing the ban. The Biden administration argued that the ban was legal.
Meanwhile, in a massive blow to the Biden administration’s push for an “assault weapons ban,” a federal court in Texas ruled in a separate case that the ATF’s attempt to regulate and tax “pistol braces” was “unlawful” and “illegitimate.”
“In a 12-page decision, the Texas-based U.S. District Court vacated the rule that could have led to the destruction of millions of firearms, among the most popular in America, and the jailing of owners who had refused to comply with the administration,” the Washington Examiner reported. The court also ripped the ATF for claiming the authority to simply change a long-standing rule on a whim.
“ATF broke the law by being overreaching sneaky pricks. Therefore, the right thing for the Court to do was throw the Rule in the trash. The Court threw the Pistol Brace Rule in the trash,” the Firearms Policy Coalition, which pushed the lawsuit, noted on the X platform.
The Examiner added:
For years, ATF gave its blessing that putting the adjustable braces on pistols was allowed even though the braces could be used as a style of stock, turning the firearms into short-barreled rifles. Typically, short barreled rifles are regulated under the Al Capone era National Firearms Act which requires a $200 tax stamp and registration.
In his decision, Judge Reed O’Connor said that the ATF was wrong in just changing its mind without giving an explanation. He also hit the agency for ignoring comments from users and writing the rule vaguely.
“The court finds that the adaptation of the final rule was arbitrary and capricious for two reasons. First, the defendants did not provide a detailed justification for their reversal of the agency’s longstanding position. And second, the final rule’s standards are impermissibly vague,” O’Connor wrote.
There are an estimated 10 million such weapons in the U.S. During an ATF-established grace period set up by the agency allowing owners to register the weapons without having to pay the $200 tax, less than 300,000 did so, the Examiner reported.
Also Friday, a separate federal court overturned Biden’s so-called “gun show loophole” in four states, calling it “invalid,” Scripps News Service reported. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk “ruled that the Biden administration’s rule that requires background checks to be performed on most firearms sold at gun shows cannot be enforced in four states,” the outlet noted.
Previously, a federal judge ruled that the three states lacked standing to sue over the rule, but Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee whose court is in Northern Texas, said they did because they demonstrated they would lose tax revenue over the rule. He also noted that he believes the states’ court action would likely succeed because the rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act.
“These new rules clearly violate the Second Amendment. The Biden administration continues to recklessly attack our constitutional rights. Louisiana will challenge them every step of the way,” said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.