Over the last few months, we’ve seen a replay of one aspect common during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, and that’s various entities getting injunctions to stop him from doing literally anything, even if it’s clearly within the purview of the president to do so.
The difference is that this time, instead of just trying to deal with it, Trump is fighting back. That means the Supreme Court, in this case.
The idea that a single judge can unilaterally make a decision, one rationalized based on personal whims rather than the law, and it affects the rest of the nation, is troubling.
But we also need to be aware of how this whole thing impacts our gun rights battles.
If you’re someone who values the Second Amendment, you should be paying close attention to a Supreme Court case that—on the surface—has nothing to do with guns. But dig deeper, and you’ll see why the fight over nationwide injunctions is a backdoor battle that could seriously affect our right to keep and bear arms.
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Why Should Gun Owners Even Care?
Let’s say the ATF tries to enforce some insane new regulation—like calling semi-auto rifles “machine guns” again. Normally, you’d expect gun rights groups to fight that in court, win, and have the rule stopped for their members.
But in the current system, one anti-gun judge can issue a nationwide ban that stops your rights even if you weren’t part of the case.
Even worse? These emergency rulings are flooding the Supreme Court’s docket, forcing them to deal with messy, rushed legal chaos instead of working through proper cases with clear facts and full records.
But What If They Try to Ban Guns Nationwide?
Justice Sotomayor actually floated this fear: “What if a new president tries to confiscate all guns? Wouldn’t we need a nationwide injunction to stop him?”
Sounds dramatic—but it’s a distraction.
As Mark Smith from the Four Boxes Diner explains, the proper way to stop unconstitutional executive actions is through the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). That’s how groups like the Second Amendment Foundation, GOA, and FPC have crushed illegal ATF rules before.
Using vacatur—a legal term that cancels a regulation—a judge can shut down an overreaching gun ban without needing to apply that ruling to every citizen instantly. Gun owners and pro-2A groups would still win in court, just through the proper legal channels.
That’s important because currently, the pistol brace rule is effectively null and void because of a judge in Texas who effectively made a nationwide ruling.
However, this is different from what we’re seeing with the current fiasco of judges unilaterally deciding to block anything and everything.
Our gun rights matter, and we most definitely need to take the necessary steps to be able to protect those should the need arise–and history shows us that the need most definitely arises on a regular basis–but the president also has to be able to govern. His entire job is enforcing the laws established by Congress, and these injunctions often cross the line from protecting constitutional rights to just thwarting his efforts.
I mean, they’ve tried to say he can’t remove bureaucrats who work for the executive branch, for crying out loud.
What matters to me is that we need the mechanisms to protect our gun rights. We’ll still have that. Nothing will change because gun rights groups have gone about things the right way.
It’s the rest of these jackwagons that will have a problem, which is fine with me.
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