Attorney General Merrick Garland plans to petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to settle the Circuit Court split surrounding bump stocks.
The case Cargill v. Garland, in which Michael Cargill sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) for directing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to change its rule on bump stocks. The ATF would redesignate bump stocks to be machine guns even though the device did not meet the criteria laid out in the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA).
“It is going to put the ATF and the Department of Justice back in that little box,” plaintiff Michael Cargill, said of the case. “We need to start getting on the offensive with a lot of things.”
The decision to change the definition of a bump stock to a machine gun came after tragic events in Las Vegas, where over 50 people were murdered at a country music festival by a deranged madman. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that the shooter had an AR-15 equipped with a bump stock. Former President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice and Attorney General William Bar to ban the device.
The ATF submitted a new rule to the Federal Register for a public comment period. Although most comments were against the proposed rule, the government moved forward with the change. Thousands of Americans were told that they possessed illegal machine guns and had to turn them in to the ATF or destroy them without compensation, although some states did offer money for the devices.
Four cases attacking the bump stock rule were filed. The government won cases in the Circuit Court for DC and the Tenth Circuit Court. There was an 8-8 tie in the Sixth Circuit. Because of the tie, the District Judge’s ruling stood. The District Judge sided with the government’s arguments.
There was a different result in Texas. With the help of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), Michael Cargill successfully sued Garland accusing the government of violating the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals en banc (full bench) ruled 13-3 in favor of Cargill. The court remanded the case back to the District Court to rule in favor of Mr. Cargill and issue appropriate relief.
Even though the Circuit Court clearly instructed the District Judge to issue the appropriate relief, The judge ignored the Circuit Court’s demand and did not issue any relief and closed the case. However, some gun stores in Texas have already returned bump stocks to the shelves. Some people debated whether the government would appeal the Circuit Court’s decision. Most legal scholars believed that the DOJ would be forced to appeal, and now the DOJ says they will appeal by Thursday, April 6th, 2023.
The DOJ is also asking for a stay against the Circuit Court’s ruling until the United States Supreme Court can decide whether to grant certiorari. Most legal minds believe that the Supreme Court will take up the case to avoid having different federal rules in different parts of the country.
The decision could affect other new ATF rules regarding unfinished frames and pistol stabilizing devices. Mr. Cargill spoke with this writer on a live stream about his hopes for the case. He states he hopes SCOTUS knocks down all the ATF’s new rules.
“The Cargill v. Garland case will be the case that protects all Americans,” Cargill said. “This is not about bump stocks; it’s about all cases going forward. It is about the brace case. This case will be the case that protects ten to forty million Americans from becoming felons overnight.”
Although likely, there is no guarantee that SCOTUS will grant certiorari in the case. There is no guarantee that the stay will be given. There is also no timeline for the Supreme Court to take up the case.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, or at www.crumpy.com.
The largest national security threat to America comes from our government itself, and not from China, Russia, or Iran.
True, but the China, Russia, NKorea and Iran axis of evil is even more evil with the aid of the Biden administration. I think that we should call it the CRINKB alliance.
“The decision to change the definition of a bump stock to a machine gun came after tragic events in Las Vegas, where over 50 people were murdered at a country music festival by a deranged madman.”
Nice job parroting of the MSM line, now please show us one projectile, in a chain of custody, linked to one of Paddocks rifles. Just one. FBI false flag.
They can’t produce even one and never will. All the evidence has been destroyed by now, and the FBI and ATF were totally in cahoots. ….. I disagree with the statement that said Trump ‘ordered’ the DOJ to ban bump stocks. According to what I have heard, Barr was asked to look into bumpstocks, by Trump, nothing more. Trump knows much more about the Deep State now, than he did back then……and so do we all, whether we admit it or not.
Correction: All the evidence, IF they ever had any at all, has been destroyed to protect the GUILTY! Remember Oswald? I do.
Ope, I was a junior in high school and not too street smart, but I knew as soon as Ruby shot him that he was innocent. Besides, when the Warren commission was investigating, the best snipers in the world had a really hard time duplicating the one gun three shot scenario. Plus, anyone who has ever shot a firearm at any animal knows where the head shot came from, and it was not from behind him… same thing with Las Vegas, but then it was not from the CIA that time. They all say they will release the full lot… Read more »
I hear bump stocks everywhere shouting: “I’m a patsy, I’m a patsy…”
Followed by “Shut up, you”, and then a .38SPL round from a 2″ revolver…???? That managed to ‘solve’ that problem in 1963. If one can loosely use the term “solved” for a problem that many see as not only still existing, but growing worse by the day. But it did manage to kick that can down the road a ways…
Remember Vallee? He was about 4 hours from beating Oswald to the grave, in Chicago.
Have you ever gone to the museum in the old book depository building? Where they have the window in question surrounded by a chain link fence so you can view the window that the shot supposedly came from? Make certain to go down and attempt to view that window from the street level outside. Note that you cannot even see the window from the street. A 3 foot wide ledge blocks the view of the street entirely. This is the reason that the published pictures of the window are all from the same level, taken from a surrounding building. Because… Read more »
Present company excluded, OFC. The commenters on Ammoland(most of them anyway…) are NOT the average man, but cut from a different cloth entirely. Thinking humans instead of sleeping sheeple.
I disagree. I’ve been to the Sixth Floor Museum and you can clearly see the spot where the limo was(by the painted “X” on the street) when Kennedy took the first round. That spot is easily verified by video and still photos taken at the time. Don’t forget that the angle from the window to the height of the limo off of the street surface is what you’re looking for, not the angle from the window to the street.
Fact: there were at least 2 other virtually identical assassination plots, but they only needed one to be successful.
How do you “disagree”? Trump literally wrote, 3/23/2018 “Obama Administration legalized bump stocks. BAD IDEA. As I promised, today the Department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period. We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns.” And… 3/12/2018 “Very strong improvement and strengthening of background checks will be fully backed by White House. Legislation moving forward. Bump Stocks will soon be out. Highly trained expert teachers will be allowed to conceal carry, subject to State Law. Armed guards OK, deterrent!…….” How much more excuses can you make for… Read more »
Stag, I am not making excuses for anything Trump said. He has said a lot about a lot of things. I read Barr’s latest book and he said in it that Trump told him to check it out and he handed it over to the BATFE. By 2018 Trump had begun becoming a politician………Did Obummer really check out bumpstocks and make them legal. Surely you jest. Obama didn’t have anything to do with bumpstocks and I think you know that….If you don’t, then……….
“I read Barr’s latest book and he said in it that Trump told him to check it out and he handed it over to the BATFE.” Yes, that’s how delegation works. Trump directed the DOJ to “do something” about bumpstocks. They could have said it’s already been looked at twice and there’s nothing we can do. Maybe they did and Trump told them to do something anyways. Trump could have also kept his promise when he said, “The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end. You have a true friend and champion in the… Read more »
Trump knows less about firearms than I know about billionaire finance; and in hindsight, ee clearly see that he completely failed to find and select the best and brightest for his advisors.
Agreed. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of people here without any hindsight and/or without the good sense to not make the same mistake over again by voting for someone who has proven they’re dangerous to our 2A rights.
Stag, I guess if you think that Trump would do it again, (try to take our guns and toys away from us) then you would be wise to not give him a second chance. However an opponent, that can take him out has not shown his or her face. I myself am becoming a little perturbed with his campaign trying to take Desantis out. Now is not the time to be quarreling amongst conservatives over nothing. Trump’s polls have gone up thirty points since being indicted and Bragg is going to get him elected, I think. When you find the… Read more »
He’s always had this “with me or against me” mentality. He goes from praising DeSantis to talking trash about him because now he sees him as a threat. Personally, I think Trump should support DeSantis but that would require Trump thinking about someone other than himself for once. Trump cares more about being president than he cares about furthering a conservative agenda but, let’s be honest, signing the single largest spending bill in the history of the world is anything but conservative. DeSantis doesn’t have near the controversy or polarizing personality that Trump has and most people just aren’t that… Read more »
I agree and maybe Trump’s ad campaign was started well before anyone expected Bragg to be so stupid as to actually indict someone for such nonsense. The Dems plan is to keep Trump from running and it is already backfiring on them. We are in bad financial straits right now and Trump received 10 million more dollars in donations within 4 hours of the announcement. Like I told Stag, there isn’t anybody with enough clout, to upend him as long as there is not too much cheating, and I think the legal American voters have had enough of that s%%t!
Stag, I pretty much agree with what you have said in your post above, except: “They would never have been given another thought had Trump not specifically asked for them to be banned.” I think you missed the point of the Mandalay massacre. It was blamed on one person with bumpstocks. It has been proven to my satisfaction, anyway, that while a bumpstock might have been used, by somebody in Las Vegas, for the most part what I heard from several different sound feeds were more than 2 fully auto weapons. They WERE given another thought by the FBI, the… Read more »
Thank you Ammoland.
Just to clarify, I meant they would most likely never have been given another thought by the ATF considering the ATF had already doubled down on the fact that they were not “machineguns” and I believe the ATF had stated they’re not in the business of regulating “accessories” that aren’t specifically mentioned in the NFA.
Thank you for your clarification………..The ATF may have stated anything to anybody and I certainly believe that that is a good argument, however you and I both know that along with bumpstocks becoming machine guns and pistol braces becoming SBRs and magazine capacities being too high, the ATF is way past the NFA. They are now the gestapo of the anti-gunners and I do not agree that Trump started all this.The way things are now, we are liable to not get to an election in ’24. Take care, Stag.
Oh, I absolutely agree. The ATF are just modern day redcoats. Of course Trump didn’t “start all this” but I am 100% certain his direction and the successful banning of an unregulated accessory got the ball rolling on forced reset triggers and braces. Now that they know they can get away with regulating things outside of their purview they’re going to be that much more difficult to stop.
TDS is strong with the Fudds here. I love the man and will vote for him again, but 2A issues? He’s not with us
My comment is awaiting approval…check back folks and see if it passes.
Same. In my experience, this tends to happens with longer comments. Maybe to weed out spammers?
As much as I hate to admit it, Trump infringed on the 2nd Amendment worse than any other president in recent times. Stag speaks the truth, don’t have to like it, but he’s right.
If you believe LVPD’s SWAT team would conspire to cover up or manufacture false evidence found inside Paddock’s hotel rooms…. i have some West Texas beachfront property for you.
as for individual projectiles recovered from bodies of those killed, the local ME’s office did have a few mangled ones early on during the investigation.
Really? Maybe you would like to tell us more………like, how come you know that and it seems, nobody else does?…. and how come these mangled bullets have never been checked out by forensics and matched to any of the guns found in the staged hotel room?
LVPD’s swat team waited how long to storm the room after the gunfire ended? I contend they waited til they got clearance from whomever was in that room staging the scene of a bumpstock holocaust.
lol… derp post. i was there in downtown okc at the time of McVey’s dirty work, saw and smelled the remnants of his smoldering truck. McVey and Nichols had zero connection to the feds…. until they were arrested.
The FBLie claimed in one report that the force of the explosion was so great that it blew the rear axle of the truck a quarter of a mile away from the bomb site, and in another report, they said that the force of the explosion was so great, that it drove the rear axle of the truck three feet into the ground! When someone asked how that could possibly be, since the truck had only two axles, one in front and one on the rear, they said that they stood behind BOTH crime scene reports! And they claimed that… Read more »
How is the weather in Moscow today?
Not all, but many. Way too much coincidence. The freak in Nashville, the day before the upmark in the House on pistol braces? Yeah no.
It happens every time. MK Ultra?
FBATFE has zero legal authority. Period. It certainly has no power to alter statute or write law, nor to ignore plain written language such as the Congressionally determined definition of machine gun, rifle, silencer, suppressor, firearm, etc, and make new definitions by pulling them out of their arse. Yet that is what they keep trying to do, to claim something is what it isn’t, and declare millions felons for their perfectly legal property and behavior.
Even if SCOTUS rules against it, the government will continue to do as it pleases.
Democrats turning citizens back into ungrateful subjects thru gun control.
I thought acting attorney general Whitaker was the one who signed the bump stock ban not Barr.
Either way it isn’t a machine gun, common sense tells us that, also I thought everything Trump did, Biden wanted to overturn.
Uneducated people who know nothing about firearms and think the government can protect their everyday lives are the problem, along with those of us who brag about our guns in public.
Something we are our worst enemy
And a single spring or pin used in a gun is not a “firearm”, either! The FF never used the word “firearm” because it didn’t exist back then! It was coined much later, after all of them were quite dead and buried.
As a former Federally Licensed Firearms Dealer and Manufacturer, I’ve owned and fired a lot of firearms. That would also include fully automatic weapons up to belt fed machine guns. What I heard and experts heard were belt fed machine guns! An AR-15 equipped with a bump stock is incapable of laying down that kind of fire!
Another thing. How did an old man remove 2 pieces of 800 lb Hurricane proof glass from those windows?!
The damned government should have no ability to appeal. Their job is to enforce the law, not influence the kaw. Like they are so fond of telling us, “you have no standing”. No dog in the hunt.
These Nazis need to be removed from the government and the country
Please excuse me, but isn’t this here one of those “Grey Poupon” moments, where we are asking questions that have obvious answers to them?? This question being, “Is this the same USSC/SCOTUS that admitted in 2022, to making the egregious mistake in Roe v. Wade way back in 1973, which they then let stand for 49 YEARS?? THAT USSC/SCOTUS?? Of course the “court” is not populated by, composed of the same people today as it was back then, but yet the idea remains the same, that the USSC/SCOTUS is supposed to being made up of people who are smarter than… Read more »
DeSantis seems pro-Second Amendment rights. We shall see.