Anti-Gun AGs Have a Very Bad Day in Court

https://bearingarms.com/subscribe?tpcc=60sale&promo_code=FIGHTWhen the Department of Justice announced a settlement with Rare Breed Triggers and other groups that, among other things, returns forced reset triggers seized by the ATF to their rightful owners, anti-gun attorneys general in more than a dozen blue states, and led by New Jersey AG Matthew Platkin, were quick to sue over the terms. 

The AG’s claimed that the ATF would be returning FRTs to owners, even in states where they’re prohibited, and sought an injunction to halt the settlement. Even after DOJ clarified that FRTs would only be returned to people in states where they’re legal to possess, the anti-gunners persisted in their lawsuit. 

Well, on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xini heard oral arguments over the AG’s requests… and it did not go well for Platkin and company. 

“Right now, I think that your standing position is weak. I think that you haven’t quite done enough … to show a real, particular, concrete injury,” Judge Xinis said Wednesday.

…

Judge Xinis said it was impossible to say how many — if any at all — of the devices would actually end up in the plaintiff states illegally.

“I do not see a whole lot of quantitative data. How much are we talking about? How many of these have been seized that are traced back to these resellers in some way?” she asked. “Predictability is all about ‘past is prologue.’ That’s pretty much what it means to be predictable, because you’ve got an evidentiary footprint that says this is likely to happen in the future. … You’ve got to give me some more stuff in the middle of the Oreo to say that what the government will do is going to cause a harm.”

There is no creamy center to the AGs argument. It’s what makes up the hole in a freshly baked doughnut: nothing but hot air (okay, enough culinary comparisons). 

Seriously, once the DOJ clarified that FRTs would only be returned to owners in states where they can legally be possessed, the AG’s main complaint was mooted. Now they’re claiming that because some FRTs might end up in states like New Jersey if a third party offers them for sale, the Justice Department should keep any FRTs that rightfully belong to those third party vendors. 

The easiest rebuttal to that argument is that states like New Jersey have already banned these devices, so if someone does offer them for sale to a Garden State gun owner Platkin has a legal remedy readily available to him: civil and or criminal charges. Given the speculative nature of the AGs complaint and the fact that they have a tool to deal with any illegal sales of FRTs, Xinis is right to be extremely skeptical (if not downright hostile) to the plaintiffs’ position. 

U.S. Department of Justice Attorney John Bailey told the court that permitting the states to intervene in a settlement they were never part of would establish a dangerous precedent, especially given the states’ weak record.

According to Bailey, the chain of events the states were hypothesizing to get to violations of their laws were too attenuated and assumed too much illegality on the part of nonparties to establish standing.

“It will greatly undermine the government’s ability to enter into settlement agreements [and] credibly negotiate if there’s a practice where states can come along and just upend it based on attenuated harms,” Bailey said. “If you can start pointing to indirect harms by third parties in order to jam up a settlement agreement … it will not just affect this administration’s settlement agreements, it will set precedents that will continue rolling down.”

That’s absolutely correct, and it’s yet another reason why Xinis should reject the AG’s request for injunctive relief and instead grant summary judgment to the DOJ, Rare Breed Triggers, and the other defendants in this junk lawsuit. We probably won’t get a ruling from the Obama appointee for at least a couple of weeks, but when it comes out I have a feeling Platkin and his anti-gun cohorts aren’t going to be happy with her decision. 

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