The ATF has been busy promulgating rules to restrict firearms, but so far, all it has done is keep lawyers fat and happy from legal fees and the US courts busy throwing out partisan acts of overreach.
A three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided on Thursday against the ATF’s 80 percent frame rule, finding that the ATF overstepped its bounds in issuing it.
The 80 percent or partial frame rule is contained within ATF Final Rule 2021-05F, and makes clear the ATF’s position that partially completed pistol frames–commonly known as 80 percent frames–are “firearms.”
The politics of civilian disarmament being what they are, we should expect ATF to either appeal or come at it from a different angle. They won’t give up. Even if a Republican wins the White House and the GOP lands on both feet withmajorities in both chambers, the bureaucracy is its own branch of government. Congress has granted it so much power that it assumes more on a whim.
I am, however, reminded of a case in New Hampshire. Prior to clarification in the law, a citizen was charged with illegally concealing a loaded firearm in their vehicle without a permit. If it is unloaded, you could conceal it, but the prosecution charged that the proximity of a magazine to the unloaded weapon constituted a violation.
New Hampshire courts, in a moment of clarity, observed that a firearm without either a magazine or no round chambered could not possibly meet the definition of a loaded weapon.
There will always be those who seek any means to harass those who choose firearms as a tool with which they might exercise the natural right to self-defense. The ATF appears to be full of them.
But we should not need courts to come you our rescue. As Ian noted on Thursday,
If the government says you have to register your guns, and you decide that it has no authority to do so, you are no longer law-abiding. You are a felon — guilty of the ‘crime’ of believing that the federal constitution actually means what it says.
So according to the government — and for that matter, according to the NRA and the vast majority of ‘gun rights supporters’ that I’ve met — you can’t have guns.
And even when the Supreme Court gets around to striking down that law in a few years, your felony conviction will still stand. So unless you have a pile of money and several years to devote to having it overturned, that won’t be of much help to you.
It’s time for people who think that only ‘law-abiding Americans’ have the right to keep and bear arms to rethink that position, which is what allows laws like this to exist in the first place.
It’s what allows the ATF to do what it does. And it is not about to stop.
