Category: Courts

One year after Chevron’s demise, gun regulation is unraveling

Just over a year ago, the Supreme Court struck down one of the main pillars of how modern federal regulation works — the Chevron doctrine.

This rule, whose name was taken from a 1980s Supreme Court case, had required federal judges to defer to federal agency interpretations of their own authority in cases where the underlying laws were vague.

The Loper Bright ruling that ended so-called “Chevron deference” last June was described as a “return to judicial balance” — a technical correction. But its consequences are now impossible to ignore.

This decision gas hit gun regulation especially hard, stripping the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of one of its key tools for enforcing gun control. Between Loper Bright and the Supreme Court’s striking down of the ban on bump stocks in Garland v. Cargill, courts across the South have begun systematically overturning rules.

Before Loper Bright, the ATF claimed the authority to decide what counts as a firearm — including whether modifications or added parts fell under regulation. The agency used that flexibility to slow the spread of dangerous modifications.

After the demise of Chevron, however, courts are no longer required to defer to agency interpretations, meaning that agencies like the ATF can no longer count on winning if they “fill in the blanks” where Congress was vague. That means every new restriction must be clearly written into law, and older rules are now being challenged in court. The ATF is left watching from the sidelines as Loper Bright has become a standard reference in gun-related cases.

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Well, that’s definitely not ‘good behavior’……

Impeach: A Judge Decides to Ignore the Supreme Court on Deportation Ruling

The Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s deportations to third-world countries can continue without limited notice, blocking an injunction by a little judge who sought to wrest immigration policy away from the executive. The high court slapped down Judge Brian Murphy’s order, but like James Boasberg, another disgrace to the bench, he’s ignoring the ruling.

This isn’t normal. While the president can remove people under the Alien Enemies Act, these judicial insurrectionists tried to claim that due process had to be applied. That’s ludicrous; none of the illegals Obama deported had court dates. It’s another episode of the judicial coup against the Trump administration. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said to be prepared for fireworks over what they will do to hold this little judge accountable.

9th Circuit Panel finds California’s 1 gun in 30 days limit, unconstitutional

Affirming the district court’s summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs, the panel held that California’s “one-guna-month” law, which prohibits most people from buying more than one firearm in a 30-day period, facially violates the Second Amendment.

Applying New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the panel first asked whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the regulated conduct. If so, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

That presumption can be overcome only if historical precedent from before, during, and even after the founding evinces a comparable tradition of regulation.

The panel held that California’s law is facially unconstitutional because the plain text of the Second Amendment protects the possession of multiple firearms and protects against meaningful constraints on the acquisition of
firearms through purchase.

Next, the panel held that California’s law is not supported by this nation’s tradition of firearms regulation. Bruen requires a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” for a modern firearm regulation to pass muster. Here, the historical record does not even establish a historical cousin for California’s one-gun-a-month law.

Concurring, Judge Owens wrote separately to note that the panel’s opinion only concerns California’s “one-gun-amonth” law. It does not address other means of restricting bulk and straw purchasing of firearms, which this nation’s tradition of firearm regulation may support.

Mexico Parrots Democrat Lawfare Despite SCOTUS PLCAA Rejection

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that anti-Second Amendment groups run by the Democrat party have been working closely with Mexican officials to attack American gun rights and subvert the U.S. Constitution. This collusion with a foreign government recently set the stage for the Supreme Court’s rejection of our southern neighbor’s $10 billion lawsuit which aimed to cripple the American firearms industry by seeking an outrageous judgement against Smith & Wesson and other U.S. gun manufacturers. But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, ever willing to blame her own country’s abject failure and corruption on others, another strategy on loan from Democrat cohorts, has decided to push forward with an almost identical lawsuit, this time targeting gun dealers and distributors in Arizona.

Nobody knows more about abusing the U.S. judicial system than Democrats, and all the big names came out to bat for Mexico in its failed Supreme Court challenge of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a federal law enacted in 2005 providing firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers broad immunity from civil lawsuits arising from criminal or unlawful misuse of their products. In both cases, the Mexican government, aka the legal arm of the narco-terrorist drug cartels, claims its damages stem from the illegal trafficking of firearms by the same cartels they work with and take bribes from under their normal course of business.

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Cynical Publius

In the future, the current practice of mutilating young children to feed their parents’ egos will be looked upon with the same disgust as we now view the Tuskegee Experiment and the lobotomization of sexually active young women in bygone decades.

But at the moment there are still sentient beings–including, sadly, three SCOTUS justices–who believe that destroying the lives of young children is a worthy political cause.

Shameful.

@SCOTUSblog
NEW: In U.S. v. Skrmetti, a closely watched case on a Tennessee law barring certain medical care for transgender minors, the court holds that Tennessee’s law can remain in place.

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Gun Free School Zones Law

The federal government may legally disarm at least some gun owners on or near school property.

That was the unanimous holding of a three-judge Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Monday. The panel upheld the conviction of a man charged with violating the Federal Gun Free School Zones Act by possessing an AR-15 in a vehicle he was living in 40 feet from a private catholic school. It ruled that the modern buffer zone around schools comported with historical analogues dating back nearly 700 years in England that prohibited possessing firearms in a manner that might “terrify the People.”

“The ‘why and how’ of 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)(2)(A), as applied to Allam, are ‘consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition,’” Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote in US v. Allam. “Put differently, ‘taken together,’ the historical analogues offered by the Government ‘establish that our tradition of firearm regulation supports the application of [§ 922(q)(2)(A)] to [Allam].’”

The ruling leaves intact one of the most expansive “sensitive places” restrictions for firearm possession in all of federal law. It deals a blow to Second Amendment advocates who have long felt that the law’s 1000-foot buffer zone around school property unduly infringes upon gun-carry rights. At the same time, the panel’s narrow ruling tailored to the specific fact pattern of the case may mitigate the fallout for gun-rights advocates.

The panel’s decision focused entirely on defendant Ahmed Abdalla Allam’s conduct surrounding his arrest.

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Supreme Court Delivers a Crushing Blow to Trans Agenda

In a resounding victory for parental rights and child protection, the Supreme Court delivered a 6-3 decision Wednesday that upholds Tennessee’s ban on so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors. This landmark ruling represents a triumph of common sense over radical gender ideology that has been targeting America’s children for far too long.

As you could have guessed, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, while the conservative majority on the court correctly recognized what Tennessee and 24 other states have already figured out: Children deserve protection from irreversible medical experiments masquerading as healthcare.

The ACLU and its allies tried to dress up this radical agenda in constitutional language, claiming that banning these dangerous treatments for gender dysphoria while allowing the same medications for legitimate medical conditions somehow violated “equal protection.” What a joke. There’s nothing “equal” about subjecting confused children to experimental treatments that could sterilize them and cause lifelong health problems.

And thankfully, a majority of the court disagreed with the ACLU. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that such policy decisions are best left to voters and their elected officials, not the courts.

In her dissent, Sotomayor accused the court of retreating “from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most,” and “abandon[ing] transgender children and their families to political whims.”

The medical establishment’s endorsement of these treatments is hardly the slam-dunk argument the left thinks it is. The same organizations pushing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have been captured by woke ideology and are more interested in political correctness than protecting children.

Meanwhile, as we’ve previously reported here at PJ Media, European countries that have been dealing with this gender madness longer than we have are now pulling back because they’re finally acknowledging what many of us have been saying all along: the risks far outweigh any supposed benefits. Various studies have supported this conclusion.

This Supreme Court decision is a massive win for the 25 states that have had the courage to stand up to the transgender lobby and put children’s welfare first. It’s a vindication of basic common sense in an age when saying that boys are boys and girls are girls can get you labeled a bigot.

Of course, the fight isn’t over. The radical left won’t give up its crusade to confuse and mutilate America’s children just because the Supreme Court dealt them a major blow. There are still battles to fight in schools, sports, and countless other institutions that this gender ideology has infected.

The Court has yet to address the broader questions of parental rights and the scope of state authority to protect children from harmful medical interventions. But Wednesday’s ruling is a crucial step toward restoring sanity to American healthcare and protecting our most vulnerable citizens from ideologically driven medical abuse.

The 9th Circuit stayed this idiocy a few hours after it was written. They’ll hear arguments on it this coming Tuesday.

About That Judge Who Tried to Strip Trump’s Commander-in-Chief Powers Last Night…

Judge Charles Breyer is another member of this unholy fraternity that’s leading this judicial coup. The man tried to—and this is just beyond laughable—wrest the commander-in-chief role from the executive last night. It lasted about 30 seconds before an appeals court slapped it down for gross overreach. It’s become the hallmark characteristic of this cabal of judges who think they’re the entire government. Once again, we have a clown in robes who would fit better as an MSNBC commentator than a judge.

Charlie, brother of former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and a Clinton nominee, shares a common thread that’s shared by most of these nutty coup jurists: he’s a race lecturer. He’s a hardcore Democrat and has donated thousands to the party. However, that’s the least shocking part. If you wish, you can listen to this panel discussion from 2020 about how the system is racist or something. You know the deal with these people.

Based on his questionnaire, Breyer said he worked on the transition team for the late Terence Hallinan, a far-left district attorney for San Francisco.

Given the current company, are we shocked this man tried for a Hail Mary to strip what is clearly a defined power of the executive? No. Breyer ruled last night that Trump—get this—must return the California National Guard, whom he federalized, to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s control. There’s a riot in Los Angeles; this isn’t some new move, Chuck. Why is it that liberals whose first names begin with Charles all seem to suck so much?

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller months ago warned that if this judicial coup continues to fester in the judiciary, we’re going to have district judges weigh in on troop deployments—that just happened. It’s an outrageous ruling that not even the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals could stomach it, which they quickly slapped down.

We’ll deal with Charlie and his robed judicial insurrectionists, but first, we need to get the reconciliation package through Congress.

ATF to Return Legal Gun Parts, Leaving 16 Blue State AGs to Suffer a Collective Meltdown

The whole “bump stock” hooraw has been settled, for the time being, following the Trump administration’s settling of a lawsuit brought by the National Association for Gun Rights. These devices, more properly called “forced-reset triggers,” allow for firing a semi-automatic rifle more quickly, at the cost of some accuracy. In the interests of complete reporting, we should note that the action of one of these devices can be duplicated with such readily available things as rubber bands or belt loops. Following the settlement, the ATD has been ordered to return some 100,000 seized devices to their rightful owners.

To summarize, 100,000 pieces of legally owned private property are being returned to their owners.

So, of course, 16 blue state attorneys general are screeching and soiling themselves in terror. They are demanding that these people not be given back their property, and as is typical, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. Consider this, from Colorado’s AG, Phil Weiser:

“The law is clear: Machine guns, and devices that turn a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun, are illegal,” Weiser said in a statement. “We’re suing to stop the ATF and the administration from making our communities more dangerous by distributing thousands of devices that turn firearms into weapons of war.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. These are not machine guns, and they cannot turn a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. With or without a forced-reset trigger, the weapon functions the same: One shot for each trigger pull. The device makes it easier to fire more quickly, but so can a thumb thrust through a belt loop.

Furthermore, machine guns are not illegal. The supply is restricted, they are very expensive, and one has to go through a defined process to own one, including a background check and payment of a “transfer tax.” But they are not illegal. Given money and patience, any law-abiding citizen can legally own one. Like this guy does.

Moving on: We’ve seen, time and again and in fact quite recently, that if you want to make your community less safe, the easiest way to do that is to elect Democrats to run that community. But the simple fact is that rifles, modified are not, are very rarely used in crime; you are about as likely to be killed by a falling vending machine as by a mass shooter with an AR-15.

And, finally, these are not weapons of war. Nitwits like AG Weiser, who know less than nothing about guns, can’t explain why an AR-15 is a weapon of war, but a functionally identical but less scary-looking Winchester 100 is not; and yet, the legislation they propose almost always prohibits the former while ignoring the latter.

It’s just stupid all the way down.

Well, at least we’re finally getting a firm idea of exactly where a majority of this court stands on the 2nd amendment’s restriction on goobermint powers when it comes to those nasty icky guns.

US Supreme Court rebuffs challenge to Washington, DC’s high-capacity gun magazine ban

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Friday to hear a challenge to the legality of a restriction imposed by Washington, D.C., on large-capacity ammunition magazines in a case that gives the justices a chance to further expand gun rights.

The justices turned away the challengers’ appeal of a lower court’s ruling that upheld the Democratic-governed city’s ban on virtually all ammunition-feeding devices holding more than 10 rounds. The lower court rejected arguments that the measure violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

The four men who challenged the law had asked the Supreme Court to consider whether the Second Amendment allows a categorical ban on arms that are commonly used throughout the United States for generally lawful purposes such as self-defense. The challengers all hold concealed-carry pistol licenses for the District of Columbia and regularly carry a pistol there.

The Supreme Court has dramatically expanded the Second Amendment in recent decades, including in a landmark 2008 ruling that struck down a strict gun control law in Washington and declared that individuals have a right to own guns for such lawful purposes as self-defense in the home.

In 2022, powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, the court made it harder to defend gun restrictions under the Second Amendment, requiring that such limits be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The District of Columbia’s government makes it illegal to possess or sell any ammunition-feeding device that holds more than 10 rounds, with only a narrow exception. The city’s lawyers in court papers wrote that it has restricted the capacity of gun magazines “in some form for close to a century.”

Washington-based U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in 2023 ruled in favor of the city, finding that large-capacity magazines are not “typically possessed for self-defense,” citing evidence showing that around two shots on average are fired in self-defense situations. The judge also found the city was likely to prevail in the case because it had demonstrated that its law is consistent with firearms regulation grounded in the “historical tradition” of the United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision upheld the judge’s ruling in October 2024, prompting the challengers to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on June 2 declined to hear a similar challenge to Rhode Island’s ban on large-capacity magazines, as well as a challenge to a ban in Maryland on powerful semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s, after lower courts upheld these restrictions.

The court on March 26 upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns.” In two rulings last year, it upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns but rejected a federal rule banning “bump stocks” – devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

Friday’s action by the court was unexpected. The court had planned to release it on Monday along with its other regularly scheduled orders, but a software glitch on Friday prematurely sent email notifications concerning the court’s decision in the case.

“As a result, the court is issuing that order list now,” said court spokesperson Patricia McCabe.

It is not the first time the court has inadvertently disclosed action in sensitive cases. Last year, an apparent draft of a ruling in a case involving emergency abortion access in Idaho was briefly uploaded to the court’s website before being taken down. That disclosure represented an embarrassment for the top U.S. judicial body, coming two years after the draft of a blockbuster ruling rolling back abortion rights was leaked.

This time, it’s not in a dissent, but as dicta in the actual decision.

Kagan Echoes Sotomayor and Accepts That AR-15s Are ‘In Common Use’

By 

Last year, in the case of Garland v. Cargill, Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissent that included the following description of the AR-15:

Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to commonly available, semiautomatic rifles.

At the time, I noted that this was an odd concession to make, given a) that Sotomayor is reflexively hostile to Second Amendment challenges, and b) that one of the most important challenges the Court is likely to hear in the coming years will revolve around precisely that claim:

. . . those who wish to ban the AR-15 have taken to claiming that the rifle is not, in fact, “in common use,” and that, as a result, it is not protected under the Second Amendment. Remarkably, Justice Sotomayor just pulled the rug from underneath that argument — and, to make matters worse, did so in an official Supreme Court opinion on the subject of firearms law. [. . .] Sotomayor even uses the word “common”! Not “everyday” or “universal” or “normal” or “usual,” but common — the very word that was used in Heller.

This morning, in her majority opinion in Smith and Wesson Brands, Inc v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Justice Kagan did pretty much the same thing:

Finally, Mexico’s allegations about the manufacturers’ “design and marketing decisions” add nothing of consequence. Brief for Respondent 23. As noted above, Mexico here focuses on the manufacturers’ production of “military style” assault weapons, among which it includes AR–15 rifles, AK–47 rifles, and .50 caliber sniper rifles.

See supra, at 6; App. to Pet. for Cert. 121a. But those products are both widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers. (The AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country. See T. Gross, How the AR–15 Became the Bestselling Rifle in the U. S., NPR (Apr. 20, 2023.)

The manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting in criminal acts just because Mexican cartel members like those guns too. The same is true of firearms with Spanish-language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history. See supra, at 6. Those guns may be “coveted by the cartels,” as Mexico alleges; but they also may appeal, as the manufacturers rejoin, to “millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.”

Note the language here. “Widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers.” “The AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country.” “They also may appeal, as the manufacturers rejoin, to ‘millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.’”

Under Heller, all firearms that are “in common use” are presumptively protected. At some point — and relatively soon — we are going to get a case in which the plaintiffs contend that the ban on AR-15s in their state is illegal under Heller. I have no doubt that, when that happens, Kagan and Sotomayor will find some convoluted reason to uphold the ban, but, having twice conceded such a key claim, that reason will need to be much, much more radical than it would otherwise have been.

This was a no-brainer. But why it even got past the District Court level before getting thrown out is the problem.

SMITH & WESSON BRANDS, INC., ET AL. v. ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS

Here, the Government of Mexico sued seven American gun manufacturers, alleging that the companies aided and abetted unlawful gun sales that routed firearms to Mexican drug cartels. The basic theory of its suit is that the defendants failed to exercise “reasonable care” to prevent trafficking of their guns into Mexico…..

Held: Because Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant gun manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful
sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers, PLCAA bars the lawsuit.

Georgia Supreme Court Upholds Carry Ban For Young Adults Under 21 Years Of Age

We’ve reported a number of times in recent years about the battle for Second Amendment rights for 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Americans. It seems anti-gun advocates think all the other enumerated rights in the U.S. Constitution are fine for young adults, just not the right to keep and bear arms.

In the latest court action concerning that particular subset of American adults, the Georgia Supreme Court on May 28 ruled that the state’s law banning possession or carry of firearms by adults under 21 does not violate the state’s constitution.

In the case,  20-year-old Thomas Stephens, along with gun-rights advocacy group Georgia 2nd Amendment, sued the state to overturn the law after a probate court denied him a weapons carry license. Stephens had argued the court should overturn its rulings in past cases related to the statute, “holding that the Georgia right to keep and bear arms is subject only to a ‘reasonable exercise of police power’ test.”

The court ruling stated: “In sum, Stephens has not offered a compelling argument that the original public meaning of Paragraph VIII is meaningfully different from the construction developed through our Court’s consistent precedent addressing the language of that provision over more than a century. Because he has not established that our precedent construing this language is clearly wrong, we decline his invitation to reconsider it. And because his only argument that the statute he has challenged violates Paragraph VIII requires that we reconsider that precedent, his constitutional challenge to the statute fails.”

Incidentally, the statute in question does have some exemptions, including those under 21 who have received military training or who possess or carry handguns on their property, in their vehicle or place of  business, or for hunting, fishing or sport shooting with a license.

Of course, both laws do violate the Second Amendment, as numerous gun-rights groups have been trying to prove in court over the past several years. However, the results have been mixed.

In January 2024, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia, ruled the state’s ban on adults 18-20 from carrying a handgun during an emergency to be unconstitutional under the new standards prescribed by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Bruen.

“We understand that a reasonable debate can be had over allowing young adults to be armed, but the issue before us is a narrow one,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote in the majority opinion. “Our question is whether the (state police) commissioner has borne his burden of proving that evidence of founding-era regulations supports Pennsylvania’s restriction on 18-to-20-year-olds’ Second Amendment rights, and the answer to that is no.”

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) recently filed its tenth such suit, this one challenging Connecticut’s ban on adults under 21 purchasing, owning or carrying handguns.

Justice Kavanaugh to Second Amendment: We’re Really Busy Now, Come Back In A Year Or Two

On December 1, 2020, the Maryland ban on AR-15s was challenged. The plaintiffs lost in the District Court and before the Fourth Circuit. In August 2024, a cert petition was filed in Snope v. Brown. The petition sat in purgatory for nearly a year with fourteen relists.

Today, the Supreme Court finally put the petition out of its misery and denied cert. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have granted. Justice Barrett, as usual said nothing. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a very unusual statement respecting the denial of the petition. The first two paragraphs explain why the Maryland decision was “questionable.” If you read these parts, you would expect a grant. Indeed, Kavanaugh as circuit judge had found that the District of Columbia’s ban on AR-15s was unconstitutional. But then, we get to the last paragraph:

In short, under this Court’s precedents, the Fourth Circuit’s decision is questionable. Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review.

The AR–15 issue was recently decided by the First Circuit and is currently being considered by several other Courts of Appeals…..

Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decision making on the AR–15 issue.

 Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.

My mouth nearly hit the floor when I read this. Kavanaugh all-but signals that he will be a fourth vote to grant cert. He does not identify any vehicle problems, or reasons why the Maryland petition should not be granted. Does he really think that rulings from the Ninth Circuit will help much in the deliberations? These courts will all rule against the Second Amendment. Nothing is in doubt. The upshot is that the Court is really busy with other stuff right now, and you all should just come back later. The Second Amendment could take a sabbatical for a year or two until the docket lightens up. Indeed, this case has been pending for nearly four years. Maryland gun owners will just have to chill.

Of late I’ve been praiseworthy of some of Kavanaugh’s actions, but this is the sort of Kavanaugh opinion that infuriates me. And where is Justice Barrett on these issues? A decade ago in 2015, Justice Scalia dissented from denial of cert in Friedman v. Highland Park, a challenge to an assault weapon ban.

This issue isn’t new. I think this term will be remembered as the term in which Justice Barrett’s slide became indisputable. I started tracking it years ago, but it is hard to ignore now.