Michael Cargill owns Central Texas Gun Works here in Austin and hosts a local radio show focused on firearms, shooting and gun rights. He’s also appeared here from time to time.
With today’s bump stock ban looming, Cargill took the incredibly dangerous firearm accessory he owns (owned) to the local ATF office yesterday and turned it in. Before he did that, though, he announced that, with the help of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, he’s filing suit agains the ATF arbitrary re-classification of bump stocks as machine guns.
Here’s the NLCA’s press release . . .
NCLA to Represent Texas Gun Enthusiast, Michael Cargill, in a Lawsuit Against the ATF’s Bump Stock Final Rule
(Washington, DC) –March 25, 2019— The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is filing a lawsuit on behalf of Texas gun enthusiast, Michael Cargill against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for passing the Bump Stock Final Rule.
Mr. Cargill will surrender his bump stock devices this afternoon at the Austin ATF Field Office in accordance with the ban. He will also be announcing his lawsuit against the ATF. The case is not about whether bump stocks should be outlawed, but rather which government body should be changing the law—and the answer is Congress. NCLA believes the ATF did not act lawfully.
“By banning bump stocks, two agencies have rewritten a law that Congress passed. Under our constitutional system, that’s not allowed. It perverts the rule of law and makes our law makers no longer accountable to the people.”—Steve Simpson, NCLA Senior Litigation Counsel
“Two different federal Courts of Appeals have ordered the ATF to halt its bump stock rule against legal challengers. Today, rather than abide by an order the ATF had no right to issue, Mr. Cargill will be joining those efforts to resist this unlawful rule.” –Caleb Kruckenberg, NCLA Litigation Counsel
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a temporary stay of the bump stock ban. The stay only applies to another NCLA client, W. Clark Aposhian, a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah who has challenged the ban in federal court. The stay prevents the enforcement of the bump stock ban against Mr. Aposhian while the Court considers his Emergency Motion for Preliminary Injunction Pending Appeal.
About NLCA
NCLA is a nonprofit civil rights organization founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the administrative state. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unchecked power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights. For more information visit us online: NCLAlegal.org
I love when people do this.
“I’m complying. By complying I gain standing to sue. So, here’s my item to show compliance and, oh by the way, you’ve been served”.
Summon got a summons!
LOL. Well played.
It is such a simple concept. We live in a representative republic, to have a law Congress must pass the law and it must be signed by the President. If some politician wants something to be illegal they need to pass the law, not demand some alphabet agency redefine it as illegal.
I say to Trump and the rest of the political class, do your damn job and take the heat for it, or shut up and get out of the way.
“It is such a simple concept. We live in a representative republic, to have a law Congress must pass the law and it must be signed by the President. If some politician wants something to be illegal they need to pass the law, not demand some alphabet agency redefine it as illegal.”
This !
BATF was created by FRAUD. — Research by Dan Meador / William Cooper;
No Jurisdiction
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has no venue or jurisdiction within the borders of any of the 50 States of the United States of America (the “Union”), except in pursuit of an importer of contraband alcohol, tobacco, or firearms who failed to pay the tax on those items. As proof, refer to the July 30, 1993, ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in 1 F.3d 1511; 1993 U.S. App. Lexis 19747, where the court ruled in United States v. D.J. Vollmer & Co. that the BATF has jurisdiction over the first sale of a firearm imported to the country, but they don’t have jurisdiction over subsequent sales.
Not Found in 31 U.S.C.
The organization of the Department of the Treasury can be found in 31 United States Code, Chapter 3, beginning on page 7. You will not find the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Internal Revenue Service, the Secret Service, or the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms listed. We learned that the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Internal Revenue, internal revenue, Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Internal Revenue Service, internal revenue service, Official Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Alcohol Administration, Director Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Division, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms are all one organization. We found this obfuscated.
No Implementation of Law
44 U.S.C. says that every regulation or rule must be published in the Federal Register. It also states that every regulation or rule must be approved by the Secretary of the Treasury. If there is no regulation, then there is no implementation of the law.
Delegation of Authority
No one in government is allowed to do anything unless they have been given specific, written authority in the law, or else someone who has been given authority in the law gives that person a delegation of authority order, spelling out exactly what they can and cannot do under that specific order. We combed the Department of the Treasury’s Handbook of Delegation Orders and we found that no one in the IRS or BATF has any authority to do most of the things they have been doing for years.
Nice copy pasta. Surprise, none of it matters in reality.
Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529 (1900), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that an individual had the right to use force to resist an unlawful arrest and was entitled to a jury instruction to that effect.
No Jurisdiction = Unlawful Arrest = Piles of Dead Agents
Enjoy.
Good luck with that.
The same line of thinking is found in people who won’t pay taxes because they think it’s illegal.
NRA is still sleeping.
Their work was done when they went along with this travesty. I guess they felt that they deserved a nap.
Perhaps we were lucky this time. If they were more heavily involved, they might have written the NRA GCA of 2019. They seem to be proud of doing that sort of thing.
“they might have written the NRA GCA”
No fan of the NRA here but their contribution to the original GCA was the sunset provision, which worked to keep that nonsense from sticking.
“…their contribution to the original GCA was the sunset provision, which worked to keep that nonsense from sticking.”
We came *so close* to losing that one. A lousy 350-odd votes in Florida (after a manual hand recount of every precinct in the state) in the 2000 election kept Al Gore out of the WH so he couldn’t make it permanent.
And we lucked out by beating Hillary. 2 more Sotomayor clones on the high court would have destroyed gun rights. They would have reversed Heller with glee, claiming they were doing the moral thing, like reversing the Dred Scott decision.
We got lucky, but we have to make our own luck, now…
I agree with both points. It’s a razor edge thin line on rights and all they have to do is win once. We’ll never see those rights reinstated again.
http://jpfo.org/articles-assd02/nra-supported-nfa34.htm
http://jpfo.org/smith/smith-friends-like-nra.htm
If I can find it again, there was a recent article on the NRA website where they proudly admitted their involvement in writing various gun control. I have posted that link several times here on TTAG. I’m finding that a couple of links no longer exist on NRA.org. Scrubbing their site like Sanger from Planned Parenthood, I guess.
The problem is that people are misunderstanding what the NRA is considering a right. The organization steadfastly supports and actively seeks PRIVILEGES in the place of the exercise of RIGHTS. That is the dirty fact about the NRA. They are not terribly shy about how they assist the government in writing gun control, not to limit the damage like they tell the rubes, but because they openly do not believe that people should enjoy the exercise of their right to the extent of shall not be infringed.
‘NRA: “In the name of safety, any person who carries or is exempted from having a CCW permit should be required to have some form of firearm training.” [emphasis theirs]’
http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?ID=3198
The NRA does not and has not honestly believed in people exercising their unalienable individual right to keep and bear arms.
I hate to sound like I am picking on the Elderly, seeing as I am heading that way, but the current management of the NRA is past the sell by date. I find that they are seriously out of touch.
That being said, you will note the media silence on the mangling of our rights.
He has a very good chance of winning this case because of his skin color. That is a sad truth. Alan M. Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation has stated on Armed America Radio that the courts are more sympathetic when a racial minority has had their civil rights violated. I know of at least seven 2A court cases were the plaintiff was black or asian and the court ruled in their favor.
Another one of DT’s games of 36D chesst. Ban the Bump Watch the lawyers jump. I’tll be Yuge
He didn’t have to wait to file suit. Standing doesn’t require that he turn in his lawfully purchased property.
You can’t sue for theft if the item isn’t stolen yet.
The lawsuit carries much more weight if filed after the enacting of the ban, this will deter the argument that a lawsuit filed against a ban that was not in place at the time is null.
He needed to be a damaged party before he could sue over the damages.
I would love to see a few thousand lawsuits over this. Choke them with paperwork. Let them know what’s coming when they go for gun bans. They can’t turn off the legal system.
This needs fought hard.
If they can classify a bump stock as a machine gun even though it does not fit any of the criteria.
What stops them from classifying AR’s as war weapons deemed illegal for civilians too dangerous for you to own, like explosives.
IIRC, ATF at one time declared bumpstocks to be legal. If they did in fact, then everyone who bought one from that time until the recent ban should be reimbursed fully for their purchase price and shipping.
This whole business is probably a test about seeing how far they can go without having to pay for confiscation. Never throw old or worn out parts away, you never know when they might come in handy.
As a shooting concept, bumpstocks encourage bad habits like ammo wasting, lack of self-control and poor marksmanship.
This is why Chevron Deference is garbage and needs to die in a horrible way.
Whether the ATF’s actions were legal or not doesn’t matter to the future of bumpfire stocks.
If the ATF doesn’t ban them, Congress and the States will. Bumpfire stocks were done as soon as that jackal in Las Vegas shot up a mountain of people with them.
Bump stocks were done before the ink dried on the Marbury v. Madison decision.
This is not about Bump Stocks, it’s about the Constitution providing rules for our government. Congress writes the laws. The Executive Branch enforces them. And the Judiciary independently interprets them. But this case threatens to consolidate all three functions in a single administrative agency—the ATF—and to contravene both the laws written by Congress and prior judicial interpretations of those laws.
…Blah, Blah, Blah…”The right to bear arms”…
How does that apply to Bump-Stocks? And we worry about things like the escalating gasoline taxes that are really a way to make it more difficult (expensive) to go to the range. Starbuck’s is a government sponsored ploy to keep us so wired on caffeine that we are to jittery to shoot straight. The Vegas massacre was shot in the same studio that they used for the moon landing. Cell phones are nothing more than a tracking device. Everyone notices the elephant in the room but they have a hard time noticing what they are stepping in. And we where looking for Trump to stand up for…Bumpstocks? In case you haven’t noticed, He is only in it for himself. Everything he is doing is what Dick(head) Cheney did -how did that work for you? Oh you might of lost your house and retirement but at least you still had your bumpstock, yea? I want to keep my guns too, but I don’t want/need morons to help me. Mr Cargill is just another self-serving wind-bag looking for his 20 minutes of fame in the national spotlight. He’ll end up getting a big check from the ‘Hillarys’ and step away quietly like all the others.