Category: Bureaucraps

10 Years and $3 Billion for a New Mail Truck?
Oshkosh Defense’s USPS van is thousands of dollars more expensive than the industry standard.

The new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs) have delighted drivers since hitting the road in Georgia last month, the Associated Press reports. But given the $5 billion investment required, taxpayers might be a tad less enthusiastic.

USPS prides itself on being “generally self-funded” through revenue from the sale of stamps, products, and services. As laudable and uncommon as this general self-funding is for federal agencies, USPS received $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. USPS also has a pension system with a $50 billion unfunded liability for which the taxpayer may ultimately have to foot the bill, Reason‘s Eric Boehm explains.

Altogether, USPS expects its total investment in new vehicles to reach $9.6 billion. Considering a significant portion of this investment comes out of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (read: from taxpayers present and future), the public is entitled to scrutinize how this money was spent.

Of the 106,000 new delivery vehicles planned for purchase by 2028, 60,000 are NGDVs. Though exact prices are difficult to ascertain, the March 2022 order of 50,000 was valued at $2.98 billion. This brings the per-unit price of the NGDV to $59,600.

The duck-like NGDV is produced by Oshkosh Defense, the same company that manufactures the much scarier-looking Medium Caliber Weapon System, an armored combat vehicle armed with a 30 mm turret. Oshkosh’s NGDV will be phased into USPS’s fleet over the next four years to replace the iconic truck that has comprised its fleet since 1987: the Grumman Long Life Vehicle (GLLV), produced by the military contractor in partnership with General Motors, Poveco, and American Motor Corporation.

The Oshkosh NGDVs boast features lacking in the GLLV, such as airbags, anti-lock brakes, collision sensors, and blind-spot monitoring—features that have been standard for years in modern vehicles. Oshkosh says it won the $3 billion “competitively-awarded” contract for 50,000 NGDVs in 2021. But comparing the per-unit price to industry-standard alternatives, Oshkosh must have a 21st-century helicopter parent definition of competition.

In March 2022, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy initially planned for 10 percent of the NGDVs to be electric, as the USPS illustrates in a helpful graphic. Following lawsuits brought about by the attorneys general of 16 states, as well as the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, CleanAirNow Kansas City, and Sierra Club California, DeJoy increased the portion of electric vehicles to over 50 percent by July 2022. By December 2022 that figure had increased to 75 percent.

Electric vehicles are about 17 percent more expensive than comparable internal combustion engine alternatives, according to automotive research company Kelley Blue Book. Accordingly, if the Oshkosh Defense contract were updated to reflect the increased proportion of more expensive electric variants of its NGDVs, the total value would be closer to $3.31 billion, making the average price per NGDV $66,200.

The manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the 2025 Mercedes-Benz e-Sprinter, the likes of which are used in FedEx’s private fleet, is $61,180—$5,000 less than the price of the Oshkosh NGDV. The non-electric Mercedes-Benz Sprinter had an MSRP of $42,430 in 2021, per Kelley Blue Book, when the USPS-Oshkosh deal was made. That’s $17,000 less than the NGDV per-unit price of $59,600.

No matter how you slice it, the USPS-NGDV program has been an expensive boondoggle. It has dragged on for nearly a decade since its inception in July 2014, while the market capitalizations of private competitors like UPS, FedEx, and DHL have grown. As it turns out, you don’t need to outsource vehicle manufacturing to the military-industrial complex to deliver mail.

Blue States Can’t Ban Your Guns So They’ll Punish You For Using Them.

Try as they might, blue cities and states can’t seem to ban their citizens’ guns. They’ve enacted handgun bans, “assault weapons” bans, registration mandates, taxes, and levied confiscatory fees on guns, ammo, and carry permits. As a result, they’ve been challenged at every turn by those who take the Second Amendment at its word. And then Bruen came along and made the job of civilian disarmament even more difficult for aspiring tyrants.

What’s a gun-banner to do then? Simple. Make life hell for anyone who dares to use a gun they own, particularly in self-defense. Look no further for an example than what happened last night in Newton, Massachusetts.

A group of people were holding a peaceful pro-Israel rally when a Hamas supporter began yelling at them from across the street. The Hamasnik, who apparently couldn’t abide free speech being exercised in his presence, ran through traffic and assaulted one of the Israel supporters, jumping on him as his back was turned.

Watch video of the altercation here . . .

It’s hard to imagine a clearer case of self-defense after the Hamas supporter tackled a man who has been identified at 47-year-old Scott Hayes of Framingham, Massachusetts. It’s been reported that Hayes is a lawful gun owner and permitted carrier, though the police investigation is ongoing.

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CDC, FBI Hiding Data Showing Good Guys With Guns Save Lives

The federal government no longer enacts the will of the people. It enacts the will of some people, most of whom seem to be unelected bureaucrats who side with an anti-gun agenda. They do not care about our rights. They simply want to see guns restricted, most likely because an armed populace isn’t one that can be run roughshod over.

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But good guys with guns cause them a problem. How can you paint the use of guns as an unmitigated evil if good people use them to stop bad people?

What’s more, the federal government has numbers that back up the claim that good guys with guns save lives. However, as John Lott notes over at The Federalist, the feds are hiding them from us.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under the Biden Administration has sought to suppress data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website. For almost a decade, the CDC referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.

This decision was taken after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove “misinformation” regarding defensive gun use estimates because of they are cited by “gun rights folks” to stop gun control legislation. Soon after, the CDC took down these estimates and now lists no numbers.

This is probably the most profound case of bias I’ve ever seen. The CDC has the numbers and had enough faith in them to post them, then an anti-gun activist took issue with them and said they prevented gun control from passing, so the CDC took them down.

And they wonder how the Dickey Amendment came into being in the first place.

They knew the truth and suppressed it simply because activists saw the truth as a barrier and asked them to take it down. Would they have done the same with COVID-19 numbers? Would they do the same with drunk driving deaths or childhood drownings?

Of course not. Nor should they. If they believe in the numbers enough to post them, they should have stuck to their guns on this.

But the issue isn’t just the CDC.

Oh no, the FBI has to have its own problems.

The FBI has also shown itself to be susceptible to political pressure. The FBI defines an active shooter attack as occurring when an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. This measure includes everything from just one person shot at, even if the target isn’t hit, to a mass public shooting. It doesn’t include, however, shootings involving other crimes, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf.

To compile its list, the FBI hired researchers at Texas State University. Police departments don’t record these cases, so the researchers relied on Google searches to find news stories about these incidents. As such, the FBI’s evidence relies on a dataset that is actively hostile to the truth.

During 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I worked as the senior advisor for research and statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. My job included evaluating the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases that it identified in the ten years from 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped over 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is eight times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.

Now, 35 percent isn’t a massive number, but we need to remember that a lot of active shootings are happening in places where there are issues with law-abiding citizens being armed.

Potential mass murderers, for example, tend to favor gun-free zones for their attacks, such as schools like Apalachee High School in Winder. They also like malls, movie theaters, and other places where a large number of people are in one place and are generally disarmed by force of law. That means these incidents are less likely to be met with armed resistance not because good guys with guns don’t stop attacks but because the law makes sure there aren’t any good guys with guns.

Then we have the fact that a lot of other active shooter incidents happen in inner cities. These are often places where gun ownership is discouraged and, in the case of anti-gun states, where the government is outright hostile to the idea of citizens with guns. Before recently, getting a permit might have been impossible, thus making it far less likely a good guy with a gun could be anywhere near the scene of such a shooting.

And this is interesting because Lott wrote this well before the events in Winder.

In that case, school resource officers–good guys with guns, even if it was their job–reacted to the attack and ended the threat with an armed response. They didn’t have to kill the shooter, either. People like that tend to be cowards. Armed resistance scares them and so they surrender, run away, or just about anything else, even if the good guy doesn’t kill them.

For all the talk about gun control in the wake of Winder, I think the more important discussion is putting guns in school staff members’ hands.

Guns save lives, after all.

You can’t stop the signal when the horse is already out of the barn

Law enforcement leans on 3D-printer industry to help thwart machine gun conversion devices
Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming semi-automatic weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America

WASHINGTON — Justice Department officials are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming weapons into illegal homemade machine guns on streets across America.

The rising threat of what are known as machine gun conversion devices requires “immediate and sustained attention,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Friday. That means finding ways to stop criminals from exploiting technology to make the devices in the first place, she said.

“Law enforcement cannot do this alone,” Monaco said during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. “We need to engage software developers, technology experts and leaders in the 3-D-printing industry to identify solutions in this fight.”

Devices that convert firearms to fully automatic weapons have spread “like wildfire” due to advancements in 3D-printing technology, according to Steve Dettelbach, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His agency reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021.

“More and more of these devices were being sold over the internet and on social media, and more and more they were actually just being printed by inexpensive 3D printers in homes and garages everywhere,” Dettelbach said.

The pieces of plastic or metal are considered illegal machine guns under federal law but are so small they run the risk of being undetected by law enforcement. Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a sweet sixteen party in Alabama last year.

The devices “can transform a street corner into a combat zone, devastating entire communities,” Monaco said.

Monaco on Friday also announced several other efforts designed to crack down on the devices, including a national training initiative for law enforcement and prosecutors. The deputy attorney general is also launching a committee designed to help spot trends and gather intelligence.

Harris-led office, ATF stonewalling probe into ‘collusion’ with anti-gun group lawsuit: House Oversight chair
Both the White House and ATF have turned down multiple House Oversight inquiries into charges of ‘collusion’ with Chicago’s lawsuit against Glock

Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning on what she characterizes as a record of a tough former prosecutor. But a White House office she has “overseen” may have focused less on gun crimes and more on targeting a legal gun manufacturer.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee says the Biden-Harris administration is stonewalling an investigation into potential “collusion” with a gun control group founded by billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to boost Chicago’s lawsuit against Glock Inc.

Since June, neither the White House nor the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, better known as the ATF, has responded to multiple inquiries from the committee.

The ATF missed its most recent deadline to respond to the committee on Wednesday, Aug. 28.

“The American people should be very concerned that, rather than prosecuting criminals, the Biden-Harris White House is colluding with anti-Second Amendment groups, and rather than responding to serious congressional requests with transparency, the White House is choosing to not comply with our request,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox News Digital.

The committee has been investigating the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s communications with the Everytown for Gun Safety regarding a lawsuit by the city of Chicago against Glock, a firearms manufacturer.

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Shooting Straight with John Lott

The mainstream media likes to use federal statistics as hooks for their one-sided gun-control narratives. The thing is, many of those statistics are suspect, even those from various federal agencies. The Crime Prevention Research Center’s (CPRC) work goes deep into how factual this “official data” is.

Indeed, when I reached out to John Lott, president and founder of the CPRC, he talked about his time working as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—a Department of Justice division that doles out about $5 billion in grants each year—during the Trump administration and about his research into crime and gun ownership. He has a lot to say about the statistics these agencies publish. As crime is an important topic in this upcoming election, we decided it was time to speak with Lott about how politically skewed these numbers from federal agencies can be.

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This brings back up ‘The Great Replacement Theory‘, but it appears to me to change the ‘why’ from mere political power to an actual hate of the normal average American who can’t be fooled all the time and can never be considered a reliable toady.

The Anti-Children Crusade

Depending on which sources you choose to believe, on or around the year 1212 A.D. there was a “crusade” made up largely of children. Supposedly it was a peace-minded movement to travel to the Holy Land and convert the Muslims there to Christianity. No, it didn’t work. Indeed, a great many of the participants were captured and sold into slavery. Others died of exhaustion before they got anywhere near the Holy Land.

Well, today there’s an ongoing “crusade” of another kind: an anti-children crusade. Those active in it will do just about anything to discourage live births, especially the births of white children. I’ve compiled a book of essays that touch on the subject. Also, Pascal and I write about it here now and then. It’s part of the reason for the decline of birth rates in Europe and North America.

The crusade against children has several parts. My fiction colleague Hans Schantz delineated some of its aspects here, in a passage from his novel The Hidden Truth. There are others beyond those Hans touches on, though. One emerged recently, from an unusual source:

     There’s a new U.S. surgeon general’s warning: Parenting can be harmful to your mental health.
     An advisory issued Wednesday by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s doctor, said parents in particular are under dangerous levels of stress.
     The report cites the American Psychological Association, saying nearly half of parents report overwhelming stress most days, compared with 26% of other adults. They’re lonelier, too, according to cited data from health insurer Cigna. In a 2021 survey, 65% of parents said they were lonely, compared with 55% of those without kids.

How about that, Gentle Reader! Taking responsibility for the life of a helpless human being comes with stress! Who could have guessed that before the Surgeon-General told us?

(By the way, how do we define “overwhelming stress?” Is there a metric of some sort? The number of antidepressants taken per week, perhaps? Or must we wait for the sufferers to commit suicide before we can confidently diagnose it?)

The stresses that impinge upon a household with minor children to care for are real enough. Yet our grandparents coped with them rather well. Generations before them did even better. That suggests that some, at least, of the stresses are of recent vintage. Rather than explore the matter in detail here and now, I’ll simply say “more anon” and proceed with my main point: the convergence of disincentives and discouragements against the bearing of children, which are most visible in First-World nations.

     A healthy fraction of those discouragements are deliberate. The people behind them don’t want white Americans to have children. White Americans – the people who built this country, and are still overwhelmingly responsible for keeping it going – are being out-reproduced by just about every other identifiable demographic. I leave the consequences to your imagination.

Who would find such a trend desirable, and why? Why does Vivek Murthy, “the nation’s doctor,” find it appropriate to add his voice to it? Anyone? Bueller?

More anon.

Biden’s Surgeon General Warns That Parenting Is Hazardous to Your Health.

Joe Biden’s attorney general has made “mental health” a priority for the government. This has both good and bad aspects to it.

There is an epidemic of “mental illness” in America, including depression, obsessive-compulsive behavior, addiction, and other impulse control problems like gambling. More serious forms of mental illness, including eating disorders, paranoia, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses, are dangerous to others as well as those afflicted.

Is parenting one of these “disorders”?

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy believes that parenting should have its very own warning label: parenting can be harmful to your mental health. It causes depression, dangerous levels of stress, and high rates of loneliness.

According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, “half of parents report overwhelming stress most days, compared with 26% of other adults,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The temptation is to classify all sorts of situations and behaviors as “mental illnesses.” Everyday life for parents is stressful, period. Full Stop. End of story. Anyone who has sat up all night with a sick infant or a screaming two-year-old can define “stress” much better than childless couples.

But who isn’t feeling that way? Elderly people are lonely and stressed. Single men are lonely and stressed. College students are lonely and stressed. Gen X moms are lonely and stressed. There’s an epidemic of loneliness and stress in this country and it’s bad for our mental and physical health, which Murthy pointed out in a previous advisory.

His stark warning doesn’t necessarily help with the real problem. Fewer people are having children, some because they can’t—or can’t see a way to attain professional ambitions along with family ones. Politicians like JD Vance are outspoken on the primacy of parenthood, and lots of people feel the job is so sacred that it’s wrong to even talk about this.

Murthy believes that parents’ loneliness comes from their being totally and completely responsible for another human being. Frankly, I think that’s a bogus construct. Being responsible for another human being — a precious life that fills us at times, with unbearable joy and brings tears of happiness to our eyes — is not really a question of being alone. Yes, there are moments of sheer terror. But there are also moments of sharing that transcend any other human experience.

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Rosen: Surgeon General misleads on gun violence

In a July speech advocating for more stringent gun control, President Biden claimed that “More children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death.” That’s surely an alarming and tragic statistic but a very misleading one.  The use of the word “children” is deceptive, emotionally bringing to mind infants, toddlers and kindergartners. Legally, a “child” can be as old as 17, or even 20 in some states, including those with felony convictions and gangbangers in inner cities, like Chicago.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, “In 2022, Black children and teens were 20 times as likely to die from firearm homicides compared to their white counterparts.”  And the great majority of those deaths are black on black shootings by teenage gangsters, not little kids. And statistically, the kinds of diseases that fatally afflict the elderly in great numbers are rare among youngsters, skewing the causes of death toward guns.

Recently, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, issued a public declaration that our country is experiencing a “gun violence crisis.”  Conversely, according to the FBI, nationwide homicides decreased by 13% in 2023 despite public perception to the contrary as reflected in a November 2023 Gallup poll that found 77% of Americans believed crime was increasing.

That apparent discrepancy can be explained by terminology, definitions and spin, especially skewing the impact of suicide, which the Surgeon General conveniently includes in his definition of gun violence.  Suicides with the use of a gun account for 56% of all gun deaths. But an act of violence is something you inflict on someone else, not on yourself. Let’s say you’re suffering from severe depression or unbearable pain from a terminal illness, and you rationally chose to end your life, this could be viewed as an act of self-compassion.  It’s not gun violence. If you hanged yourself, instead, would that be “rope violence?”

The disconnect between the overwhelming public perception of rampant crime in the U.S. today and misleading statistics to the contrary are tied to the definition of crime.  It’s true that the homicide rate per 100,000 population has gone down over the past 30 years.  But suicide is not the same as homicide and the public perception of rampant crime goes way beyond “homicides.” It covers pervasive crimes like car thefts, vandalism, rioting, burglaries, muggings, squatting, or flash mobs looting retail stores with impunity.

Even worse are the cybercrimes bilking the elderly of their life savings.  To say nothing of the hordes of illegal aliens criminally crossing our southern border — who then compound the felony by not showing up for their court dates with the forbearance of the president of the United States and his secretary of Homeland Security.

When prosecutors in Democrat-controlled states refuse to charge trespassers, rioters, petty criminals, and radical insurrectionists who construct illegal encampments and occupy buildings on college campuses their crimes go unrecorded in the crime stats.  The political activists who harassed and besieged the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices whose rulings they disagreed with violated federal law, but they were allowed to persist by politically-motivated Democrat officials in Washington.

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms for whatever reason he or she desires.  While the number of guns in this country has more than doubled in the past 30 years, the decrease in the homicide rate over that period indicates that law-abiding Americans intend those guns for justifiable personal defense or deterrence, as well as for hunting or sport shooting. These days, you’re taking on undue risk by not owning one.  Those intent on crime will legally or illegally obtain guns regardless of gun control laws that unreasonably burden the rest of us.

Although he wears a quasi-naval uniform and carries the three-star rank of Vice Admiral, the Surgeon General of the United States is not a sea-going admiral.  As the “Nation’s Doctor,” he’s an administrator not a practitioner (and he doesn’t make house calls).  He’s a bureaucrat who commands more than 6,000 public health officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and his purview is the physical and mental health of all Americans.

His diagnosis of “gun violence,” which inflates the numbers by including suicide, and his prescription to ban legal so-called “assault weapons” are outside his expertise and authority.  In the immortal words of a real Admiral, David Farragut, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

ATF Requested Stay Denied in Force Reset Trigger Case

Federal District Court Judge Reed O’Connor for the Northern District of Texas denied the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) request for a stay on his ruling that blocked the ATF from taking enforcement actions over force reset triggers (FRT).

Earlier, Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the ATF exceeded its authority when it determined that FRTs were machine guns in the National Association for Gun Rights v. Garland. FRTs use the bolt carrier group (BCG) of an AR-15-style firearm to reset the trigger of the gun. This reset allows the shooter to increase the rate of fire of a firearm. The ATF claimed that since the rate of fire approaches that of a machine gun, it made the device a machine gun conversion device. Under federal law, any device that converts a semi-automatic firearm to a machine gun is itself a machine gun.

Machine guns are defined under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA). The actual law doesn’t reference a fire rate when determining a machine gun. According to the law, a machine gun fires multiple rounds with a single function of the trigger. An FRT doesn’t work that way. A firearm equipped with an FRT expels one round per trigger function. The ATF made the same argument about bump stocks in the Cargill case, but the Supreme Court ruled against the government and stated that bump stocks were not machine guns.

The statute reads: “For the purposes of the National Firearms Act the term Machinegun means: Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

The plaintiffs claim that since an FRT requires that the user pull the trigger between each round, it could not be considered a machine gun. In the past, the ATF tried to use Chevron deference to change the meaning of a law, but because of the recent Supreme Court opinion in the Loper Bright Enterprises case, Chevron deference is dead. Chevron deference says when a law is unclear or ambiguous, the agency of authority has the final say as to the law’s meaning. This decision stripped the ATF of using Chevron deference in this case, even though it probably would not have been successful.

The ATF tried to use Chevron deference in the Cargill case, but SCOTUS rejected that tactic, stating that the definition of a machine gun is not unclear or ambiguous. Chances are high that the court would come to the same conclusion in this case. The ATF claimed that not issuing a stay would cause irreparable harm to public safety. The judge rejected the argument, saying that the only people charged with having an FRT were also charged with other crimes, so possessing an FRT was only an “add-on” crime. He also stated he did not believe that the defense was likely to succeed on the merits of the case.

The judge extended the time frame the ATF has to return the approximately 11,884 Rare Breed Triggers FRT-15s and Wide Open Triggers (WOT) it had confiscated from owners. Initially, Judge O’Connor gave the ATF 30 days to return all the triggers it confiscated from gun owners. The ATF went door to door to seize the triggers from owners but stated it could not return them in 30 days. The judge increased the time of the deadline by five months. The ATF now has six months to return all the triggers to their owners.

“For the foregoing reasons, the Court DENIES Defendants’ Motion to Stay Judgment Pending Appeal (ECF No. 104),” the order reads. “The Court grants Defendants an additional SIX (6) MONTHS to comply with the affirmative obligation, which SHALL be completed by February 22, 2025. This extension does NOT apply to the Individual Plaintiffs or members of the Organizational Plaintiffs who specifically request the return of their FRT devices and provide sufficient documentation to the ATF. ATF shall return those as soon as is practicable following the specific request.”

The ATF is appealing the judge’s decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, although since this is the same court that ruled against the ATF in Cargill, it seems like a long shot that they will side with the ATF. The arguments in both cases are almost identical.

U.S. Government Appeals Pistol Brace Decision to 5th Circuit

After nearly three months of silence, the U.S. Government has now appealed the June 13, 2024, pistol brace decision to the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The appeal was announced on August 12, 2024. The case is Mock v. Garland, and it was brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition.

The ATF pistol brace rule targets stabilizer braces attached to AR pistols, claiming the braces turn AR pistols into short barrel rifles (SBRs). And since SBRs are regulated under the National Firearms Act (1934), the ATF issued its rule on AR-pistol braces to stop what it saw as a way around SBR regulations.

Breitbart News reported that U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary injunction against the AR pistol brace rule on November 8, 2023.

Kacsmaryk observed that the “court is not insensitive to the ATF’s concerns over gun industry gamesmanship and attempts to circumvent the rules on SBRs.” But he followed that acknowledgement by quoting Bruen (2022), noting that the government may not justify the passage and/or existence of a regulation by “simply [positing] that the regulation promotes an important interest.”

In a decision dated June 13, 2024, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor vacated the ATF’s AR pistol brace rule, saying it violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The U.S. Government has now appealed the pistol brace decision to the Fifth Circuit.

Breitbart News pointed out the Fifth Circuit decided against another ATF rule–a ban on bump stocks–on January 6, 2023. The court did so in light of the ATF’s arbitrary recategorization of bump stocks as “machine guns.”

Federal Appellate Court Rules in Favor of Takings Lawsuit Against the CDC’s Covid-Era Eviction Moratorium.

The 2-1 decision overrules a trial court decision that went the other way, and could set an important property rights precedent.

On Wednesday, in Darby Development Co. v. United States, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which reviews takings claims against the federal government ruled that a takings lawsuit against the 2020-21 federal eviction moratorium can proceed. In so doing, it overruled a trial court decision by the Court of Claims, which I criticized here. The decision could well end up setting an important takings precedent.

In September 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the Trump Administration Centers for Disease Control (CDC) imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium, claiming that it would reduce the spread of the disease. The Biden Administration extended the moratorium multiple times.

In August 2021, the eviction moratorium was invalidated by the Supreme Court because the CDC lacked proper statutory authority to institute it. But, in the meantime, numerous landlords suffered financial losses, because they could not evict tenants who weren’t paying rent.

Some of the property owners filed a lawsuit arguing that the eviction moratorium violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay “just compensation” whenever it takes private property. As I explained at the time, their position was backed by the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which held that even temporary physical occupations of property qualify as “per se” (automatic) takings requiring compensation.

In May 2022, the US Court of Claims dismissed the takings lawsuit against the CDC moratorium on the perverse ground that there was no taking because the CDC’s eviction moratorium was never properly “authorized.” In other words, the government could escape takings liability because its actions were illegal! The recent Federal Circuit decision reversed that ruling.

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Second court crushes Biden’s assault on AR-style pistols.

Today [the 9th]  another federal court rejected President Joe Biden’s war on guns, ruling against his effort to require 3 million to 7 million owners of AR-style pistols to register and pay a $200 tax on their firearms or face prison.

In the latest blow to liberal gun control politicians and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s plan, claiming it was likely to get tossed by the Supreme Court.

For now, the millions of users of guns equipped with “pistol braces” can keep them without fear of being fined or jailed.

The court said the ATF rule was poorly written and vague and gave the agency too much leeway to go after owners of the popular firearms.

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ATF Moves to Halt Forced Reset Trigger Ruling, Appeals Decision

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is arguing in a new filing that it cannot meet a federal court’s order to return the forced reset triggers (FRTs) they collected when they effectively banned the devices last year.

Last month, U.S. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor ordered the vacatur of an ATF rule classifying FRTs—a rapid-fire trigger device—as regulated machinegun parts. O’Connor further ordered the ATF to return, within 30 days, any FRTs it seized from manufacturers, resellers, or individual owners while its rule was in effect.

The ATF has since filed motions challenging O’Connor’s ruling, including appealing the ruling up to the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals and requesting a stay of the lower court’s decision.

Arguing their motion to stay O’Connor’s ruling, the ATF said it would be difficult to meet the requirement to turn over any seized FRTs within 30 days.

“ATF does not know the identities of the Organizational Plaintiffs’ claimed members,” the federal agency wrote in its Aug. 1 filing, referring to the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) and Texas Gun Rights.

“Thus, ATF has no ability to determine who must be returned devices under the Order,” the ATF’s legal filing continues. “And even if an individual approaches ATF and self-identifies as an Organizational-Plaintiff member, ATF does not have the means to verify the accuracy of that representation, or whether they were, in fact, a member at the time the complaint was filed, as is necessary to receive relief.”

O’Connor’s order for the ATF to return seized FRT’s didn’t stipulate that the agency should only return the devices to the organizational plaintiffs. Rather, his ordered simply directed all of the seized devices be returned.

“The Court ORDERS Defendants to return to all parties, including manufacturers, distributors, resellers, and individuals, all FRTs and FRT components confiscated or seized pursuant to their unlawful classification within thirty (30) days of this decision,” O’Connor’s July 23 instruction states. Continue reading “”