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Saturday, December 22, 2018
PATRIOT NURSE: TRUMP & NRA PASS BUMP STOCK BAN; STOCK MARKET ROUTE; 2019 PREDICTIONS~TRUMP'S BUMP STOCK BAN IS A BIGGER DANGER FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT THAN MOST REALIZE
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Once President Trump is gone, and the next Obama/Clinton/Sanders,
etc. holds the reins of the executive branch, there will be no legal
barrier to the Attorney General “recognizing” the “danger” of all those
“machine guns” in public hands, and criminalizing them with a scratch of
a pen.
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)-
The Second Amendment means what it says, and laws restricting access
to, or possession of firearms, ammunition, firearms accessories, knives,
swords, nunchaku,
billy clubs, black-jacks, or other implements of war or personal
defense, violate the fundamental right to arms and the Second Amendment.
Any gun is every gun, and any law restricting anything that can be
characterized as a personal arm is an assault on all types of arms.
That's the philosophy. Now let's talk about existing law and bump-stocks.
Under
the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act, machine guns are
tightly regulated, and no new machine guns can be added to the existing
pool of legally transferable machine guns. The BATFE has promulgated –
at the president's instructions, and with the agreement of the NRA
– new regulations “clarifying” the terms “single function of the
trigger” and “automatic” as they relate to the definition of “machine
gun” under these laws. The effect of these “clarifications” is to
support their declaration that “bump-stock-type devices” convert
semi-automatic firearms into full-automatic firearms, thus making the
devices themselves “machine guns” and subject to the restrictions
outlined in the NFA and GCA.
The new determination
also opens up a new avenue of attack on all semi-automatic firearms, as
they all now meet the definition of a weapon that “can be readily restored to shoot” more than one shot with a single function of the trigger. That is a very big problem.
This
new ruling is almost certainly going to survive the legal challenges
being brought against it. I see it as highly improbable that those
challenges will be successful at doing anything more than possibly
delaying the enforcement of the new restrictions for a short time, and
just maybe getting some compensation for owners who are forced to
surrender or destroy the devices (though I think that is very unlikely).
Unfortunately,
we the people have allowed the federal government to restrict certain
classes of firearms for over 80 years, and in that time, substantial
case law and precedent supporting those restrictions has been built up.
The core issue of the constitutionality of these restrictions has never
had a serious day in court, and this reinterpretation of the regulations
is not going to provide that constitutionality hearing. If it did, we
would almost certainly lose. Not because we're wrong and the
restrictions on machine guns are right, but because there is not enough
jurisprudence and scholarly opinion in place to effectively support our
arguments, and most judges and politicians are terrified at the idea of
machine guns being legal. They will bend over backward to make sure that
doesn't happen. Even the late Justice Antonin Scalia made it a point to
exclude machine guns from the Heller decision, on the basis of an “in common use”
test. He applied a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance to argue that
machine guns are not commonly owned in the U.S. while ignoring the fact
that the only reason they are not more common is that they have been
heavily restricted for over 80 years, and virtually banned since 1986.
Regardless
of the devious and circuitous ways we got to where we are today, the
fact is, the cards are heavily stacked against machine guns, and there
is little that can be done against the phalanx of laws, regulations, and
judicial prejudice lined up against them.
That's not to say we shouldn't try. I strongly support efforts to challenge this new BATFE regulation.
The
first challenge case was filed by the Firearms Policy Coalition and is
being handled by attorneys Josh Prince and my good friend Adam Kraut (who I am again endorsing in his run for a seat on the NRA Board of Directors in 2019).
Erich Pratt at Gun Owners of America has also announced plans to file a
suit against this BATFE reversal, and I applaud both efforts. I just
don't think it's likely that either will be successful, because I
believe BATFE's arguments for their decision will be very convincing to
any judge who hears them.
The argument boils down to whether a firearm employing a bump-stock is “automatically” cycling the action and firing more than one shot with “a single function of the trigger.”
Our side says no because each shot requires some manual action on the
part of the shooter to actuate the next shot. The counter-argument from
the new BATFE Firearms Technical Branch analysis contends that the act
of maintaining steady forward pressure with the support hand – which is a
critical requirement of all bump-fire-type devices, and is included in
all of their operator instructions – constitutes a “single function.”
The shooter's steady forward pressure on the fore-end replaces the
trigger finger as the actuator of the firing cycle, and that steady
forward pressure can readily be characterized as a “single function.”
The shooter is not releasing and reapplying pressure as they would
firing in normal semi-auto mode, but rather maintaining a steady
pressure, which is momentarily overcome by each recoil pulse. The gun
automatically repeats the firing cycle as long as the forward force is
maintained, and there are only a handful of judges in the country who
would not agree with that explanation and conclude that the described
process meets the statutory and regulatory definitions of a machine gun.
We
can argue among ourselves about these technical distinctions, but until
everything goes to hell in a hand-basket, a group of judges reading
current laws, regulations, and judicial precedents will be the ones
making the final decision, and I see virtually no chance of them
agreeing with our side.
While I'm not happy about how this has
all gone down, and where it has ended up, I'm much more concerned about
the broader implications of this new regulation going forward.
For
decades, rights advocates have argued that conversion of a
semi-automatic into a full-automatic, is a complicated and challenging
process requiring specialized skills and equipment. Though there have
been various workaround techniques demonstrated, such as the infamous,
full-auto shoestring, and the time-honored, file-down-the-disconnector
trick, there has never been an easy way to truly convert a
semi-automatic into a machine gun. This new regulation changes that.
Whether
you agree with the BATFE's new definitions or not, once this goes into
effect, under the color of law, it will be a straightforward thing to
technically “convert” any semi-auto into a “machine gun.” And that creates some severe issues because the law also defines “machine gun” to include “any weapon” that can be “readily restored to shoot” more than one shot with a single function of the trigger.
Interdynamic_KG-99 Pistol
It is also long-established law, that “readily restored” actually means “easily converted”
to fire full-auto, such as the KG-9 pistol, which was classified as a
machine gun because it fired from an open bolt, and could be relatively
easily converted to full-auto by filing off the secondary sear.
By legally defining “bump-stock-type devices” as “machine guns” that can convert semi-automatic guns into “machine guns,” then by these same definitions, any semi-automatic rifle becomes a “machine gun” because they can all be “readily restored” to be “machine guns.”
We're
not likely to see an attack from this direction while Donald Trump is
in the White House. But he won't be there forever, and once he's gone,
and the next Obama/Clinton/Sanders, etc. holds the reins of the
executive branch, there will be no legal barrier to the Attorney General
“recognizing” the “danger” of all those “machine guns” in public hands, and criminalizing them with a scratch of a pen.
The
Supreme Court has already allowed a lower court to get away with
distorting Justice Scalia's dicta in the Heller case to mean that AR15s
are not covered by the Second Amendment. Because they are “like M-16s,”
and Scalia himself, made it clear in his dicta that he didn't want to
include machine guns in the protections of the Second Amendment, so we
can't expect much support from that quarter.
The bump-stock issue
has been mishandled from the beginning, and now it has turned into a
matter that can do little more than raise some money for a few groups
and reduce unemployment for lawyers while blowing a gaping hole in our
future defense of the Second Amendment.
Jeff Knox
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff
Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The
Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun
rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The
Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second
Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by
Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots
activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with
a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms
Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
