GOA’s Erich Pratt BLASTS Supreme Court over 2A Cases

President Donald Trump got an opportunity almost no president gets. He was able to nominate three justices to the Supreme Court and get them confirmed. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were all examined, and we generally found them to be acceptable on issues like gun rights.

So while one of the other conservative justices on the Court–Chief Justice John Roberts–is a squish on guns, these three, coupled with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, seemed poised to make a massive positive difference on gun rights in this country.

And yes, we got the Bruen decision. That was fantastic.

However, as GOA’s executive vice president Erich Pratt notes over at The Federalist, the Supreme Court hasn’t been what some of us hoped.

The Supreme Court just issued a decision allowing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to rewrite the nation’s gun laws. It appears that the seven justices have contracted a bad case of “Gun Derangement Syndrome,” or GDS — a serious infection that afflicts many on the federal bench.

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Until recently, the Supreme Court seemed immune to this illness. After nearly all federal circuits mused that the Second Amendment did not so much as protect an individual right to bear arms, District of Columbia v. Heller set the record straight. And after lower courts devised “judge-empowering interest-balancing tests” to circumvent Heller, The New York State Bar Association v. Bruen course-corrected.

But recently, cracks have begun to show. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in United States v. Rahimi, for example, arguably waters down Bruen’s rigorous requirement that governments must justify firearms laws with historical analogues — directing courts merely to follow the “principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition,” whatever that means. So wishy-washy was the Rahimi opinion that Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence to remind everyone that Bruen is still good law.

Bondi v. VanDerStok Decision

But now, Gorsuch seems to have contracted GDS as well. Authoring the court’s Bondi v. VanDerStok decision, he (and six others) sanctified ATF’s decision to redefine unfinished firearm frames and receivers and so-called “weapons parts kits” as actual “firearms” under federal law. That way, unfinished blocks of plastic and metal are subject to all the paperwork, tracking, and de facto registration that applies to actual firearms.

I’m in complete agreement regarding the Court, especially after VanDerStok.

The truth of the matter is that “unfinished blocks of plastic and metal,” as Pratt described it, aren’t guns. The fact that the ATF is now permitted to treat them like guns is problematic simply because there’s no definitive line in place anymore.

It used to be that something you could assemble into a gun as it was counted as a gun, and anything shy of that mark wasn’t. We used the term “80% receivers,” but the truth was the ATF didn’t give even that much of a line. Just one hole needing to be drilled was enough to escape scrutiny as the ATF defined things, though everyone went beyond that.

Now, they can keep moving the line as much as they want, because you know our side will keep pushing the boundaries. Can’t do an 80 percent receiver anymore? Cool. Introducing the 75 percent receiver.

Can’t do that anymore? Meet the 70 percent receiver.

And with VanDerStok’s ruling, the ATF can keep on moving things as much as they want.

But we weren’t supposed to get this with this Court. This wasn’t what we expected when we supported all three of the Trump-nominated justices.

Couple that with the cases they’ve refused to hear, cases that could easily have put gun rights back on track, and we’ve got a big problem with the Supreme Court.

Some wonder if some of the justices are feeling the heat due to death threats or whatever, and if that’s the case, then security needs to be stepped up so that they can rule according to the Constitution, not the whims of the most evil in our society.

Regardless, there’s a lot to dislike about the way the Supreme Court has gone on guns. Pratt and I are in total agreement.