John Crump at Ammoland reports that
Gun Owners of America (GOA), Bridge City Ordinance, and North Dakota resident Eliezer Jimenez have sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) over its new rule on unfinished frames and receivers.
After Joe Biden became president, he tasked the ATF to come up with new regulations surrounding privately manufactured firearms (PMF) and pistol stabilizing devices. Biden’s ATF unveiled new rules for a public comment period. Gun owners flooded the comments, but the Bureau moved forward and unveiled the new rules in the White House Rose Garden.
The rule is due to go into effect in late August. According to the new regulation, Americans can still build their own firearms, but it does make it almost impossible to get all the parts to build a gun. Frames and jigs cannot be sold together. If a gun owner buys the items separately, the ATF will consider that structuring the purchases to get around the new regulation.
The other big issue is that if a company sells a frame, and a second company sells a jig, and a customer buys the items from both companies, those companies can be charged with conspiracy. The ATF will charge both companies with conspiracy even if the companies are not connected in any way besides a customer using both sites to purchase items. The lawsuit challenges both of these points in the ATF’s final rule on PMF.
Read John’s full story here.
As the lawsuit argues . . .
The Final Rule will sow chaos within large segments of the firearms community, from both the perspective of the industry and the perspective of consumers (law-abiding gun owners), including the individual and the members and supporters of the organizational plaintiffs herein.
The breadth of the Final Rule is massive in the changes to federal firearms law that it imposes on the American people by regulation (rather than by legislation). The Final Rule represents perhaps the most sweeping gun control scheme since the Gun Control Act of 1968, incorporating many of the restrictions found on the legislative wish lists of the nation’s most radical anti-Second Amendment groups, but restrictions which Congress has never seriously considered (much less enacted).
These changes cannot be viewed in isolation, as the changes imposed in ATF’s omnibus rulemaking work together to bring the nation much closer to an outcome clearly prohibited by the Second Amendment: (i) mandated serialization of all firearms (and some gun parts), enabling ATF to (ii) mandate federal recordkeeping of all firearms, followed by (iii) ATF forced collection of all such records, followed by (iv) entry of those records into a federal database amounting to registration of firearms and their owners. And, as history has taught all too often, registration leads to confiscation.
You can read the full lawsuit is here.