A U.S. District judge on Wednesday sided with a 2A group and its members over the arbitrary ban on some forced reset triggers as enforced by federal regulators.
The National Association for Gun Rights and three members who either own or want to own FRTs sued the U.S. Department of Justice over the ATF's 2022 guidance that some of the devices were unregistered machine guns as defined by the National Firearms Act, with the penalty for possession ranging as high as 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
The thing is, as determined by U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, the triggers didn't pass the standing threshold in the NFA of how a machine gun is defined. Further, the ATF didn't have the juice to make such a ruling, a role which is the duty of Congress.
"The Constitution assigns such legislative choices to the appropriate elected officials, not life-tenured judges and unelected bureaucrats," said O'Connor in his 67-page order, citing the Supreme Court's recent Cargill ruling on bump stocks. "Rather than respect this intentional feature of our democratic system, Defendants chose to advance a policy agenda wholly divorced from the NFA's statutory text. Thus, to allow the Defendants' unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite the NFA. That is not how our democratic system functions."
As such, O'Connor, a 2007 appointment to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, vacated the ATF's "unlawful classification of FRTs as machine guns" and enjoined the agency from further enforcing it.
In closing, O'Connor channeled the Founding Fathers, bald eagles, and the right to keep and bear arms in a stirring final salvo.
Every year, our country commemorates the revolution waged against a tyrannical executive. To safeguard against future tyranny, our founding documents designed a system that prevents undue concentrations of power in order to protect important rights and to ensure that a legislative consensus is reached before enacting laws on the most important issues in society. Such foresight is especially prudent in cases like this one. Indeed, while this case may seem focused on firearms, it represents so much more. It is emblematic of a devastating problem that increasingly rears its head in federal courts: rampant evasion of the democratic process. Few issues more acutely underscore this problem than the present case. Our nation would do well to remember the very reasons and spirit that inspired our democratic system of governance in the first place.
The plaintiffs welcomed the ruling.
"We are absolutely thrilled that the court has dealt such a decisive blow to the ATF’s unconstitutional agency overreach," said Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights. "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."
