Tag: 2nd amendment

Pro-Gun Organization Wins Lawsuit Against ATF’s Trigger Prohibition

On July 23, 2024, The National Association for Gun Rights was victorious in a summary judgment from the Federal District Court, Northern District of Texas, which overturned the ATF’s prohibition on forced reset triggers.

The ruling was issued by Judge Reed O’Connor, which vacated the ATF’s prohibition on forced reset triggers, declaring resoundingly that the ATF went beyond the scope of its statutory powers by redefining forced reset triggers as machine guns. The ruling was partly based on the Supreme Court’s recent Cargill decision overturning the ATF’s bump stock prohibition regulation.

Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights (the legal arm of NARG) declared, “We are absolutely thrilled that the court has dealt such a decisive blow to the ATF’s unconstitutional agency overreach. The ATF under the Biden/Harris regime has utterly trampled the Constitution and the rule of law in their eagerness to destroy the Second Amendment. The ATF may appeal this ruling, but precedent and momentum are both on our side, and we fully anticipate the absolute end of the ATF’s unlawful, unconstitutional ban on forced reset triggers.”

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Kamala Harris’ Gun Control Schemes Are No Laughing Matter

Joe Biden lied about guns, Second Amendment rights and nearly everything else so often that even his staunchest supporters stopped taking him seriously. The country’s 46th President beclowned himself with his own falsehoods.

Biden was a classic fabulist. He invented stories and assigned himself the starring role. Whether he was singlehandedly confronting hunters armed with standard-capacity mags in a Delaware swamp, exaggerating the efficacy of the 1994 federal Assault Weapon Ban or making up colonial cannon prohibitions, Biden received more Pinocchios than Disney, which is one of the reasons why he’ll be sitting in a beach chair rather than behind the Resolute Desk for the next four years.

By comparison, Kamala Harris has been much more circumspect about her anti-gun plans, and despite her maniacal cackle, could prove a more serious opponent to our Second Amendment rights than her former boss ever imagined possible.

Last year, most likely at the insistence of Barack Obama, Biden put Harris in charge of the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Biden said would “centralize, accelerate, and intensify our work to save more lives more quickly.”

The Office has no website. Its budget has never been made public. Its staffing levels are not known. It operates in secret, without oversight and wields tremendous power. Only three staffers were identified. One has a long association with Obama.

Almost immediately, it became clear that the Office was an incubator and a clearinghouse for anti-gun policy that it pushed out to blue states.

In December 2023, Harris hosted a gaggle of state lawmakers at the White House to showcase the Office’s new gun-control policies. The names of the attendees were not released, nor were the details of the meetings. None of the meetings were recorded or transcribed.

After overseeing the Office, Harris’ anti-gun rhetoric has sharpened, and it is clear what she has in store for law-abiding gun owners if she replaces Biden on a permanent basis.

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DOJ Doubles Down On Claim That Medical Marijuana Patients ‘Endanger Public Safety’ If They Own Guns

The Justice Department is doubling down on its position that medical marijuana patients who possess firearms “endanger public safety,” “pose a greater risk of suicide” and are more likely to commit crimes “to fund their drug habit”—justifying, in the government’s eyes, a federal ban on gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that upheld the constitutionality of governments setting certain gun restrictions in a case centered around domestic violence-related prohibitions, the justices remanded a pending cannabis and Second Amendment rights case back to the lower court for reconsideration.

Late last week, plaintiffs and DOJ submitted briefs in a separate case that responded to the potential implications of the high court’s latest decision for the federal statute barring gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

In the filings submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, DOJ urged the panel to affirm an initial district court ruling that deemed the cannabis and firearms ban to be constitutional, while appellants are requesting a reversal of the order.

This is the latest development in the two-year case, with a group of Florida medical cannabis patients arguing that their Second Amendment rights are being violated because they cannot lawfully buy firearms so long as they are using cannabis as medicine, despite acting in compliance with state law.

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Ammo Vending Machines Arrive At Grocery Stores In Red States 

Nothing says ‘Merica like supermarkets with automated vending machines stocked with ammunition. A select number of supermarkets across Alabama and Oklahoma have these new machines. This means you can leave the store with milk, eggs, and boxes of 9mm and .223 rounds. 

American Rounds installed AI-powered ammunition vending machines in several Alabama and Oklahoma supermarket stores. These vending machines are said to feature built-in AI technology, card scanning capability, and facial recognition software to verify that buyers are 21 or older and match the identity on the license. 

“Our automated ammo dispensers are accessible 24/7, ensuring that you can buy ammunition on your own schedule, free from the constraints of store hours and long lines,” American Rounds notes on its website. 

American Rounds shows six supermarkets, including two Fresh Value stores in Alabama and four Super C Mart stores in Oklahoma, have these new retail automated ammo dispensers. 

In an interview with Newsweek, Grants Magers, CEO of American Rounds, said that the company’s AI-powered ammunition vending machines have recently been expanded to eight across four states. 

“We have over 200 store requests for AARM [Automated Ammo Retail Machine] units covering approximately nine states currently and that number is growing daily,” Magers said. 

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Supreme Court Throws Out Pro-Gun Group’s “Assault Weapons” And Magazine Ban Case

On July 2, 2024, the United States Supreme Court rejected certiorari in National Association for Gun Rights v. Naperville. The case is currently going through the discovery, trial, and summary judgment phases at the district court.

“Today’s decision tells the lower courts they’re more than welcome to trample Bruen to their hearts’ content – at least for the time being. The question all along has been whether the Supreme Court was okay with the lower courts’ outright and unanimous defiance of the plain holdings of Bruen. Today we got our answer: for now at least, the Second Amendment IS a second-class right, and it will remain so until the Supreme Court decides to stop ducking the issue,” declared Hannah Hill Executive Director for the National Foundation for Gun Rights. 

The US District Court rejected a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of the law, which plaintiffs subsequently appealed to the 7th Circuit. The 7th Circuit issued a ruling upholding the district court’s denial of preliminary injunction, determining that AR-15s are not firearms under the Second Amendment in complete defiance to multiple precedents established by the Supreme Court.

The National Association for Gun Rights appealed to the Supreme Court, calling on the high court to overturn the 7th Circuit’s ruling and establish a nationwide precedent definitively throwing out gun prohibitions. 

Justice Clarence Thomas published a statement describing the 7th Circuit’s ruling “nonsensical” and declared “It is difficult to see how the Seventh Circuit could have concluded that the most widely owned semiautomatic rifles are not “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment.” Thomas added that when the case returns to the Court in a final judgment posture, the Supreme Court “can – and should” review the 7th Circuit’s decision if it maintains it preliminary injunction reasoning.

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Watchdog sues for ATF records about shooting death of Arkansas Airport Official

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) records regarding the fatal shooting of Little Rock, Arkansas, resident and Executive Director of the Clinton National Airport: Bryan Malinowski.  

Malinowski was shot and wounded by ATF agents in shootout an ATF raid on his home in March. He died of his injuries. When originally asked for pertinent records, ATF produced only heavily redacted search warrant court filings. 

The lawsuit was filed June 10, 2024, after the ATF failed to respond adequately to an April 16 FOIA request for: 

  1. All emails and text messages sent to and from ATF officials regarding Little Rock resident Bryan Malinowski who died in an ATF raid on March 19, 2024.
  2. All records related to the raid on the home of Bryan Malinowski, including but not limited to, re-operational briefing documents, raid plans, investigative reports, memoranda, warrants and audio and video recordings.

On April 22, 2024, Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach, asking for details about “the deadly pre-dawn raid conducted by ATF in Little Rock, Arkansas, while executing a search warrant on the home of Bryan Malinowski, a local airport executive.”

An affidavit, which was unsealed after Malinowski’s death and produced to Judicial Watch, alleged he unlawfully sold guns without a license.

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U.S. Supreme Court Sends Marijuana And Gun Case Back To Lower Court, Emboldening DOJ’s Defense Of Firearm Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court has sent a case concerning gun rights for marijuana consumers back down to a lower court after issuing a potentially relevant ruling in a separate Second Amendment case, and the Justice Department is now reiterating its position that cannabis use warrants a ban on firearm ownership.

The high court has remanded several gun cases to their respective lower courts in light of the ruling in United States v. Rahimi, which affirmed the government’s right to restrict gun rights for a man with restraining orders for domestic violence. The cases heading back to lower levels include at least one related to the cannabis ban, and DOJ is now arguing that the SCOTUS decision “undermines” a federal court’s ruling that deemed the prohibition for marijuana consumers to be unconstitutional last year.

In a supplemental letter brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where the United States vs. Daniels case was remanded by SCOTUS, the Justice Department said history “supports the government’s authority to disarm categories of persons whose firearm possession would endanger themselves or others.”

“Consistent with that principle, Congress may temporarily disarm unlawful users of controlled substances during periods of active drug use, when they present a special danger of firearm misuse,” it said. “The Supreme Court’s decision in Rahimi also is in tension with this Court’s opinion in United States v. Daniels, which made some of the very methodological errors that Rahimi corrected to find Section 922(g)(3) unconstitutional as applied to a marijuana user. The district court’s judgment should be reversed.”

DOJ has argued in multiple federal cases over the couple year that the statute banning cannabis consumers from owning or possessing guns is constitutional because it’s consistent with the nation’s history of disarming “dangerous” individuals.

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US surgeon general declares gun violence a public health emergency

The U.S. surgeon general on Tuesday declared gun violence a public health crisis, driven by the fast-growing number of injuries and deaths involving firearms in the country.

The advisory issued by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s top doctor, came as the U.S. grappled with another summer weekend marked by mass shootings that left dozens of people dead or wounded.

“People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe,” Murthy told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “America should be a place where all of us can go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.”

To drive down gun deaths, Murthy calls on the U.S. to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons.

None of those suggestions can be implemented nationwide without legislation passed by Congress, which typically recoils at gun control measures. Some state legislatures, however, have enacted or may consider some of the surgeon general’s proposals.

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No Charges in ATF Killing Over Paperwork Firearms Violation

Agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) suspected that Bryan Malinowski, executive director of the airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, and an avid firearms collector, was reselling enough firearms at gun shows to make him more of a commercial dealer than a hobbyist. That meant he should, in the ATF’s view, get a Federal Firearms License. So on March 19, agents did what law enforcers do when they suspect people of paperwork violations: They raided his home before dawn, taped over the doorbell camera, and shot Malinowski dead less than a minute later when he opened fire on intruders who had just busted in his front door.

Unsurprisingly, the ATF agents are on their way to evading consequences for causing a man’s death over a paperwork violation.

Self-Defense, But for Who?

“A law enforcement officer is justified in using deadly physical force if the officer reasonably believes that the use of force is necessary to defend himself or a third person from the use of deadly force,” Sixth Judicial District Prosecutor Will Jones writes in his letter to ATF Special Agent Joshua Jackson absolving the agent who killed Malinowski of legal liability. “Given the totality of the circumstances, Agent 2 had a reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to defend himself and Agent 1. Therefore, the use of deadly force by Agent 2 was in accordance with Arkansas law and was justified.”

Of course, Malinowski himself might have felt justified in using deadly force given that the front door to his family’s home had been battered down just seconds after strangers began banging on the door.

“Had he survived he was almost certainly entitled to claim self-defense in the wounding of the agent based on the reckless manner in which the government planned and executed the search,” Bud Cummins, a former U.S. Attorney who represents the Malinowski family, told me.

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