A Federal Court Thwarts the ATF’s Unconstitutional Power Grab

 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has made clear that the agency can’t unilaterally rewrite gun laws to say what the public wishes they said.

Last week, an en banc panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the executive branch of the federal government is not permitted to make up the law as it sees fit simply because public sentiment has been outraged by a tragedy. Thirteen judges joined the majority opinion, with three opposing them in dissent.

Superficially, the stakes of the case were concrete. It had a plaintiff: Michael Cargill. It had a couple of defendants: Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Steven Dettelbach, the director of the ATF. And it had a live legal controversy: whether the ATF’s 2018 decision to ban bump stocks was consistent with either the 1934 National Firearms Act or the 1968 Gun Control Act. But, at its heart, the case was about the nature and the integrity of written law. In Michael Cargill v. Garland, et al., the Fifth Circuit upheld the notion that we write our laws down for a reason, and that, if we wish to alter the meaning of those laws, we must choose words other than the ones of which they are currently composed.

That the Fifth Circuit sided so completely with the plaintiffs should not have been a surprise. In 2018, during the presidency of Donald Trump, the ATF determined that non-mechanical bump stocks (which allow a shooter to pull the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon more quickly than he could with his finger alone) could be classified under federal laws as a “machinegun,” and be regulated accordingly. But, as the court’s majority noted, this determination was pulled out of thin air in response to widespread political pressure. “When ATF first considered the type of bump stocks at issue here,” the court observed, “it understood that they were not machineguns. ATF maintained this position for over a decade, issuing many interpretation letters to that effect to members of the public.” As a matter of fact, the court recorded, before 2018 the agency had never concluded otherwise: “From the time ATF first considered non-mechanical bump stocks to 2017, it categorized that type of bump stock as not being a machinegun.”

And then, suddenly, it changed its mind, “subjecting anyone who possessed a bump stock to criminal liability.” Why? Well, because of the “tragic events that occurred in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017.”...more