Franklin Arms Notches Massive Win Over ATF

One issue gun control advocates have is that no matter what laws they concoct and push into place, someone in the firearm industry gets creative and finds a way around them. For example, the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban was thought to, well, ban so-called assault weapons, at least in the minds of many. Instead, companies just made guns that weren’t legally “assault weapons” despite being essentially the same firearm.

Any law you create, someone will find a way around it.

That includes the National Firearms Act. Those laws might be trickier to get around, but Franklin Arms found a way with one of their guns. Chambered in .300 Blackout, it’s not rifled, which means that despite having a stock and a short barrel, it’s not a short-barreled rifle.

The ATF gave the company approval for its design, then revoked it, saying that the gun was suddenly an SBR when it wasn’t before.

They fought back, and I’m glad they did because they won.

That challenge saw the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota grant summary judgment this week in favor of FRAC and Franklin Armory, ordering the ATF to create procedures for transferring certain firearms as the Regard and Antithesis under the Gun Control Act within six months. 

U.S. District Judge Daniel M. Traynor, a 2020 appointment to the federal bench by President Trump, said the ATF overreached when it labeled the innovative new firearms as being NFA items. 

“Congress gave ATF the ability to enforce the law, not change it,” said Traynor in his 28-page ruling. “Franklin Armory created a weapon that doesn’t fit into the round holes made by Congress, but that does not give ATF authority to change the shape or size of the hole to make the Reformation fit. The separation of powers ‘is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty.’ Administrative agencies need to remember they are in the executive branch and leave legislating to Congress.”

With the recent departure of the ATF’s avowedly anti-gun leadership and an Executive Order from Trump for newly-confirmed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to evaluate “the positions taken by the United States in any and all ongoing and potential litigation that affects or could affect the ability of Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” it remains unsure if the government will seek further appeal of the case. 

This is, of course, similar to what the ATF did regarding bump stocks. They weren’t machine guns under the definition provided in the National Firearm Act, the definition voted on by Congress, but they still classified them as machine guns just the same. They do not have that authority. That’s properly the role of Congress, if we’re to assume this falls under the historical tradition of gun restrictions, which I’m not.

My hope is that Bondi doesn’t push this one any farther. There’s no point in doing so because the case is just way too similar to Cargill, where the ATF lost before the Supreme Court. It would be a doomed cause and a waste of taxpayer money.

Considering how DOGE is rolling, that’s probably the last thing the Department of Justice needs to be accused of doing.

Frankly, I think what Franklin Arms did is brilliant. .300 Blackout probably has enough punch to not need rifling for any additional power at impact, and while it may not have the same range as it would with a rifled barrel, I guess it’ll have enough to do what most of us would use something like this for.

And the fact that it lets someone have what amounts to an SBR, simply one without the “R” that makes it an NFA item, and saves them all the rigamarole of registering it with the ATF is just icing on the cake.

I also figure everyone else is going to do something like this in due course, so who knows how common these kinds of firearms might become in the gun safes of the United States.