Ninth Circuit Tosses Gun Controllers’ Lawsuit Against ATF

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court ruling in California and directed the judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the gun control group Giffords and the state of California against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 

The lawsuit challenged the ATF’s interpretation of its own “frame or receiver” rule, complaining that the agency’s take on the rule wasn’t expansive enough. The ATF expanded the definition of a “frame” and “receiver” to include partially completed items that could be “readily converted” to fully functional devices, but it also stated that “[a] billet or blank of an AR-15 variant receiver without critical interior areas having been indexed, machined, or formed that is not sold, distributed, or possessed with instructions, jigs, templates, equipment, or tools such that it may readily be completed is not a receiver.”

Giffords, along with the state of California, filed suit in the Golden State convinced that the exception (known as Example 4) wasn’t a part of the actual rule itself, and that unfinished frames and receivers sold by themselves should also be treated as finished firearms. The group called Example 4 an “arbitrary line [that] leaves open obvious and easily navigable loopholes that run counter to the GCA’s basic commands” and declared the agency “entirely fail[ed] to consider an important aspect of the problem” that the rule supposedly was meant to address. 

The district court sided with the plaintiffs and granted summary judgment, declaring Example 4 unlawful and unenforceable. ATF appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and in today’s unanimous decision a three-judge panel vacated the district court’s decision after determining that none of the plaintiffs had standing to sue over the agency’s interpretation of the rule.

At summary judgment, California argued that Example 4 caused it to increase financial expenditures “to accelerate implementation of State legislation regulating ghost gun parts, as well as increased expenditures of time, money, and resources to train law enforcement personnel statewide on ghost guns.” For its part, GLC [Giffords Law Center] argued that ATF’s insufficient regulation of ghost guns frustrates GLC’s core mission and requires the organization to divert resources to combat the proliferation of ghost guns and ghost gun-related violence. Both Plaintiffs maintain their respective arguments before us. Their arguments each fail because their evidence does not factually establish the requisite causal link between Example 4 and their claimed injuries.

The panel says the plaintiffs’ arguments “faced strong headwinds” from the start because neither California nor Giffords Law Center were directly impacted by the language of Example 4. 

California’s evidence falls short because it speaks to the problem of ghost guns generally, offering no data regarding the specific unregulated products subject to Example 4. The declaration asserts that “the vast majority of these ghost guns were assembled using commercially-available firearms precursor parts,” including “approximately 15-20%” of ghost guns made with unfinished receivers possibly subject to Example 4, but California’s evidence fails to distinguish products that are now regulated under the GCA by the Final Rule from those that are not. Additionally, California’s evidence focuses almost exclusively on expenditures that California made to combat the growth of ghost guns from 2016 to 2022, a period predating the Final Rule. During that time, the Final Rule was not in effect, and any ghost gun-related harm that Californiasought to address cannot be attributed to Example 4.

The only post-enactment evidence California submitted actually cuts against its argument. The state reported that in July 2021, 9 percent of all firearms recovered were “ghost guns”, but after the rule took effect the percentage decreased to somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. As the panel pointed out, that suggests that “in California’s largest county, the Final Rule caused a decrease in the prevalence of ghost guns—at least as measured by the share of ghost guns recovered out of total firearms recovered—which is the opposite trend that California’s theory requires.”

As for Giffords’ alleged injury, the panel concluded that it suffers from the “same causation flaws” as California’s theory.

GLC’s evidence does not isolate Example 4 products from ghost guns generally, much less show how the Final Rule and Example 4 will work together to predictably cause an uptick in harm caused by ghost guns made from the relevant unfinished receivers, to which GLC claims it must respond. Nearly all of its documented expenditures and activities also predate the Final Rule.

The frame and receiver rule itself was declared invalid on Second Amendment grounds by a federal judge in Texas this week, and so far we’ve seen no indication from DOJ that it plans to appeal that decision. The language that Giffords and California found so objectionable may actually go away, but so will the rest of the rule that treats unfinished frames and receivers like fully functional firearms. 

Giffords and California can ask for an en banc review by the Ninth Circuit, and given the appellate court’s history of hatred towards the right to keep and bear arms their request could be granted. Still, with the rule itself in doubt, an en banc review may not help the plaintiffs in the long run. The fact that two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by Joe Biden is also a bad sign for the anti-gunners, but that doesn’t mean the plaintiffs won’t waste taxpayer and donor dollars trying to expand a rule that might not even be enforced in a month or two. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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