Michael Cargill runs Central Texas Gun Works in TTAG’s home base of Austin, Texas. He also trains and qualifies a lot of people for concealed carry permits…though not as many as he used to since Texas became a constitutional carry state. That, however, is another story for another time.
You may know of Cargill as the named plaintiff in Cargill v. Garland, the case that the en banc Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided in his favor, obliterating the Trump bump stock ban. That decision, of course, is a very big deal, one that sets up a likely Supreme Court grant of cert to decide not only the bump stock issue, but potentially so much more in terms of limiting the grasping, over-regulatory practices of the federal administrative state.
Cargill is a SHOT spreading the word that, as good as that news was, it’s not over. Not by a long shot. He wants gun owners to know that, even if they live in the Fifth Circuit, they shouldn’t dredge up any bump stocks they may have lost in boating mishaps. The last thing anyone should want to do is become a test case.
His message: let the process play out. While the ruling was wonderful and extremely important and he has a lot of cautious optimism about the ultimate outcome if and when the Supreme Court has its say, nothing is done until it’s done.
Cargill is something of a one-man gun rights operation. He’s become a very pointy thorn in the ATF’s side with the help of a couple of organizations that have backed him in his legal battles.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a foundation dedicated to rolling back the power and reach of the administrative state, backed him in his bump stock lawsuit. More recently, the Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation got behind him in a suit challenging the Biden administration’s war on guns and the ATF’s unprecedented shutdowns of FFLs over simple clerical errors on 4473 forms.
Read that complaint here.
Cargill’s in Las Vegas rounding up support from gun rights orgs for his current efforts as well as other challenges to unconstitutional firearms-related regulations he has planned. Here’s hoping he finds what he’s looking for.