Category: Bureaucraps

Another take on SCOTUS killing Chevron Deference

What SCOTUS’ Chevron Deference Decision Means for Gun Owners and the ATF

Much of the coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the Chevron Deference doctrine suffers from one of two problems: Either it’s written by lawyers for lawyers and is therefore unintelligible for anyone without a juris doctor, or it’s written by the corporate media and is chock-full of errors, omissions and untruths.

Bill Sack, director of legal operations for the Second Amendment Foundation, agreed to help clarify this landmark Supreme Court decision, which it turns out is good for gun owners and bad for the ATF.

Q: What is the Chevron Deference doctrine?

A: “By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., which gave rise to the doctrine known as Chevron Deference. Under that doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable.

What the Chevron Deference doctrine did was when administrative agencies write regulations, they often will have their own administrative courts that interpret the regulations the agency has drawn up. For example, if the EPA makes a regulation that says a factory can only put out so much pollution, and there is a question as to whether a specific factory violated the regulation, the first place the factory has to go is the EPA’s administrative court, where an EPA administrative judge will interpret the EPA’s regulations. If the factory is unsatisfied with the EPA judge’s decision, they can appeal to federal court. What Chevron Deference did was this: If the administrative court’s decision was appealed, the federal court was then supposed to be heavily deferential to the findings of that administrative court.

Basically, the doctrine put a thumb on the scale in favor of the administrative agency.

The federal court was supposed to give a lot of deference to what the administrative agency found. From a liberty perspective, this is a separation of powers problem. The administrative agency, as an executive agency, is supposed to enforce the law. It’s not supposed to write the law. It’s not supposed to interpret the law. These alphabet agencies were writing regulations, which is a legislative function. They were enforcing the regulations, an executive function, and then they were interpreting the regulations, which is a judicial function.

The ATF and the alphabet agencies were doing the jobs of all three branches of government and if challenged, the federal courts were supposed to defer to what their administrative courts found. Even if the federal court thought the agency’s administrative court got it wrong, they didn’t always overrule the decision. They believed that these agencies were the experts, who were best at administering and interpreting the own regulations. For example, the courts acted like since the EPA found that the EPA did nothing wrong, we’ll defer to them since they’re the experts.”

Q: What specifically did the U.S. Supreme Court decide?

A: “Chevron was overturned formally based on the Administrative Procedures Act, which sets out the procedures that federal agencies must follow as well as instructions for the courts to review actions by those agencies. The Supreme Court decided that this deference was unlawful. The Supreme Court said federal courts should start from scratch, rather than showing deference to the alphabet agencies. The High Court removed their thumb from the scale.”

Q: How will this decision affect the ATF?

A: “Hopefully, it tones down all of the administrative agencies because it returns power to the judiciary. It should tone down the ATF just like the rest. They can no longer adjudicate their own rules and say, ‘we’re right because we said we’re right.’

The writing has been on the wall for some time that Chevron would get knocked down. In a few of the (Administrative Procedure Act) challenges, the ATF has said they are not relying on Chevron to make their point. I suspect they didn’t want to hang their hat on Chevron. During the pistol brace and bump-stock cases, the ATF specifically said they were not relying on Chevron Deference.

If Chevron Deference were still alive, the ATF could write a rule like pistol braces. If someone was prosecuted for it and believed they shouldn’t have been found guilty in an ATF court, the ATF could rely on Chevron Deference during the appeal.

It was a big tool that every administrative agency had in their quiver.”

Q: How will the Supreme Court’s decision affect cases already in litigation, such as bump-stocks, pistol braces, frame and receiver and who needs an FFL?

A: “I don’t believe it will affect any of the current cases against ATF because the ATF has already disclaimed using Chevron.”

Q: Will this decision have any impact on the hundreds of gun dealers who have had their Federal Firearm Licenses revoked by the ATF for minor clerical reasons? (This question was posed to Adam Kraut, the Second Amendment Foundation’s executive director.)

A: “No. Revocation is entirely within the administrative process. The ATF only has to show a single willful violation. It’s not ambiguous where it would be difficult to ascertain what Congress meant. The courts have defined what willful is — they did something the law said they can’t do. Whether it was intentional, or they transposed some numbers, it’s still willful. There’s no deference in that regard. They don’t have to defer to the ATF to interpret anything,” Kraut said.

Q: Do gun owners still need to go through the ATF’s administrative process or can they now go straight to federal court?

A: “They still have administrative courts. They will still adjudicate violations of their own regulations, but if you want to appeal, the federal court has much greater leeway to overturn the administrative agencies with Chevron gone. The courts should be much better equipped to keep the administrative state in check,” Sack said.

Q: How will the Supreme Court’s decision affect gun owners?

A: “Big picture — for ATF and all of the other administrative agencies — it will hold their feet to the fire to interpret their own regulations fairly.”

 

BLUF
In short, the death of Chevron may be good for the state of the law as a whole, but it’s not the magic bullet some gun rights commentators seem to think it is.

Analysis: The Death of Chevron and the Future of Gun Litigation

Friday brought a rare instance of a no-nonsense Supreme Court decision unambiguously reversing prior precedent in a way that has far-reaching consequences–but maybe not for gun policy.

Loper v. Raimondo saw the Court stating, in no uncertain terms, that Chevron, “a decaying husk with bold pretensions,” is overruled. Twitter–and my email inbox–were ablaze with theories about what this might mean for gun litigation. In all likelihood, though, the impact on Second Amendment cases will be more muted than many expect.

It’s easy to understand why people might think Chevron would have had an outsized impact on the firearm space. After all, it seems as though the ATF–an administrative agency–has been the primary source of tumult for gun owners over the last three administrations. Where an admin agency is the source of pain, it seems natural to presume a legal concept that advantages administrative agencies would be a huge lever in that conflict. But practitioners and astute spectators alike would observe that Chevron hasn’t been invoked in the gun space very often at all.

Simply stated, Chevron’s death won’t be as dramatic as some commentators expect in the gun law arena largely because the ATF has been expressly disclaiming and attempting to avoid its application for years. Likely knowing Chevron was on shaky ground, and because its application to laws with criminal penalties is inappropriate, the government has fairly consistently simply asserted in gun cases that its legal arguments are ordinary legal arguments rather than agency arguments entitled to deference under Chevron.

To understand the tension here, it’s important to understand what Chevron actually did. Even when it was at its strongest, the application of Chevron was limited to situations where the statutory provision being litigated over was ambiguous, and there was a “permissible” agency interpretation. In those instances, the court would defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law, even if the court disagreed with the interpretation.

Chevron was always controversial, as it was in tension with the core legal principle that courts are the only ones who can say what the law is. That’s why the Supreme Court began walking Chevron back almost as soon as it was decided.

In fact, the Supreme Court hasn’t deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016.

More pointedly, though, there is a critical reason you won’t see the government arguing that gun laws are ambiguous, which had always been a threshold question in Chevron cases. Why? Because gun laws almost always involve criminal penalties, and the longstanding rule of lenity states that in cases involving criminal consequences, any ambiguities in the law must be resolved in the least restrictive manner. This would make the road to proper reliance on Chevron, on the part of the government, a minefield of instant losses.

That is not to say that the death of Chevron won’t have any impact on gun litigation. But it will most likely be more nuanced than revolutionary.

For example, as explained, the ATF has been making its legal arguments for years now by basically saying, “this is how you ought to read the law, even if you weren’t deferring to us.” Even where Chevron wasn’t supposed to be applied, including in criminal cases, it’s quite likely the overarching idea of Chevron–that administrative agencies are experts and thus know more about the laws they are tasked with–has poisoned the minds of judges all the way down, manifesting as subconscious deference to the agency’s interpretation of the law.

This vestige of Chevron is probably the most lasting, and unfortunately–as the dissent in Loper makes clear–that idea will be very hard to shake. The simple fact is, though, that no matter how technical a statute is, they are meant to have come through the legislature, which is–for better or for worse–a bunch of lawyers. While nerdy, lobster-clawed science-types at the EPA might have nuanced understandings when it comes to sniffing nitrogen, that doesn’t change the fact that laws have to be consistently interpreted.

In short, the death of Chevron may be good for the state of the law as a whole, but it’s not the magic bullet some gun rights commentators seem to think it is.

Defensive gun use and reality

How often do Americans use guns in lawful self-defense? It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because many who send a criminal to flight by merely demonstrating they are armed, never report the incident. The same is true for many who brandish their handguns, or even point them at criminals, instantly convincing them running for their lives is the better part of valor.

Refusing to report is surely common in blue states, where law-abiding citizens can be virtually certain if they report lawful self-defense, they’re far more likely than the criminal that forced them to defend themselves to be arrested and prosecuted. Even in red states, many don’t want to take the chance.

Another factor that has become obvious during the Biden administration is as many as 7,000 police agencies—surely most if not all blue—have stopped reporting crimes, particularly violent crimes. This represents about a 35% reduction in the number of cities reporting crimes. No reports of crime, no crime exists, and leftists can claim huge reductions in violent crime even as they decriminalize crime and refuse to prosecute criminals.

There have, however, been a number of studies whose results are revealing. The Clinton administration conducted such a study, secure in their belief the results would conclusively prove lawful self-defense with guns was rare, a result they planned to use in pushing even more gun control schemes. To their horror, they found as many as 1.5 million such cases per year. They tried to hide the result, but it eventually leaked. Another study, which, to the horror of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists has stood the test of time and every attack, indicates as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, and in only 8% of those cases, was it necessary to shoot the criminal attacker. In 82% of cases, merely revealing a handgun and/or demonstrating the will to use it were sufficient to end an attack. In such cases, we can never know if the criminal was intent on robbery, rape, kidnapping or even murder.

The Centers For Disease Control have long been prohibited by law from using taxpayer dollars to advocate for gun control, which has not, of course, stopped them. A recent CDC report has been revealed to be ridiculously unprofessional and invalid. Conducted entirely by telephone, it had these four primary problems:

1. They were unable to determine whether firearms were stored loaded or unloaded during the phone interviews.

2. They were only able to obtain data from the eight states, which is statistically meaningless.

3. Some respondents did not want to disclose whether they had a firearm in their home.

This is surely a major factor in that Americans have never been more mistrustful of the government, particularly when speaking about gun ownership.

4. All of the data was self-reported to the researchers, and therefore “subject to social desirability and recall biases.”

One might also wonder why the CDC, which is ostensibly supposed to be dealing with disease vectors, should be spending time and money on an incompetently done telephone survey about gun storage in the home. As one might imagine, the survey ignored lawful defensive gun uses, the need for which is one of the primary reasons Americans keep firearms in their homes. By the way, the CDC was forced to admit the aforementioned flaws.

Why would anyone want to suppress the truth about lawful, defensive gun uses? They do irreparable damage to the anti-liberty/gun narrative, which holds guns are inherently evil,  and so are those who own them. They have the mystical power to compel their owners to murder. Guns exist only to kill the innocent—that would be leftist favored victim groups–and far fewer people own guns than the “gun lobby” claims, yet guns are everywhere, are responsible for unimaginable carnage and must be banned. Despite there being few guns, anyone owning a gun is virtually certain to kill a family member, despite firearm accidents being at a 100 year+ low.

There’s no logic or reproducible results supporting anti-liberty/gun “research,” which is why those that advocate that position simply resort to lying, which lies are eagerly and uncritically trumpeted by most of the media. Fortunately, Americans have wised up. For nearly 60 consecutive months, they’ve bought more than a million guns a month. They may not be willing to tell the government how many guns they own or how they use them, but they’re more than willing to use them to protect their families, and if necessary, to preserve our representative republic.

That’s what really scares our self-imagine elite.

Comment O’ The Day – ‘Publius’

Do you want to understand the significance of Chevron in as concise a manner as possible?
Here it is:
Nobody ever elected Fauci or Birx. And for every Fauci or Birx you know, there are a thousand just like them that you don’t know lurking in every nook and cranny of your over-regulated life.

That. That’s it. That’s why it was essential to overturn Chevron.

BLUF
So there you are.  A return to the rule of law, being treated as just the opposite.  Par for the course in today’s political discourse, alas.

The Supreme Court, Chevron, and the Political Class’s Worst Nightmare: Accountability.

Goodbye, Chevron deference.  Larry Tribe is already mourning the Supreme Court’s overturning of NRDC v. Chevron, in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases, as a national catastrophe:

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Oh, the humanity!

Well, speaking as a professor of Administrative Law, I think I’ll bear up just fine.  I’ve spent the last several years telling my students that Chevron was likely to be reversed soon, and I’m capable of revising my syllabus without too much trauma.  It’s on a word processor, you know.  As for those academics who have built their careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference, well, now they’ll be able to write about what comes next. And if they’re not up to that task, then it was a bad idea to build a career around a single Supreme Court doctrine.

And that wasn’t the only important Supreme Court decision targeting the administrative state, a situation that has pundit Norm Ornstein, predictable voice of the ruling class’s least thoughtful and most reflexive cohort, making Larry Tribe sound calm.

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Sure, Norm, whatever you say.

But how about let’s look at what the Court actually did in Chevron, and in the Loper Bright and Relentlesscases that overturned it, and in SEC v Jarkesy, where the Court held that agencies can’t replace trial by jury with their own administrative procedures, and in Garland. v. Cargill, where the Court held that agencies can’t rewrite statutes via their own regulations.  I don’t think you’ll find the sort of Russian style power grab that Ornstein describes, but rather a return to constitutional government of the sort that he ought to favor.

At root, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is about deference.  Deference is a partial abdication of decisionmaking in favor of someone else.  So, for example, when we go out to dinner, I often order what my son-in-law orders, even if something else on the menu sounds appealing.  I’ve learned that somehow he always seems to pick the best thing.

Deference doesn’t mean “I’ve heard your argument and I’m persuaded by it,” (though something like that is misleadingly called “Skidmore deference, “ but isn’t actually deference at all).  Deference means “even if I would have decided this question differently, I’m going to go with your judgment instead.”

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What with today’s decision reversing Chevron deference, I see no way that the bureaucrap’s rule on unfinished receivers stands.

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Fortunately, we will not have to wait too long to see if Cargill stands alone or reflects a broader trend of checking ATF claims of authority. On April 22, 2024, the Court granted certiorari in Garland v. VanDerStok, a case challenging the ATF’s “frame or receiver” rule as beyond the scope of the agency’s authority. A decision in VanDerStok will likely come during the Court’s next term.

Garland v. Cargill: The Court’s Textualists Stick to Their Guns

Because it involves guns, Cargill v. Garland has been seen by supporters and opponents alike as a Second Amendment case. That is not really correct. Rather, it presents a question of basic statutory interpretation. And in answering that question, Cargill is a triumph of textualism and separation of powers concerns over purpose-driven interpretation and legislative intent.

For the majority, the words on the paper are what matter, even if the Congress that wrote them might have done things differently. It does not matter if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck if it doesn’t have the features that Congress used to define a duck.

On the separation of powers front, Cargill is a victory for congressional lawmaking authority. Administrative agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) cannot step in and rewrite statutes by administrative fiat just because Congress is not acting as quickly as they might wish.

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The Dangers of a Desperate Biden Campaign

After Thursday night’s disastrous debate performance, Democrats are officially gameplanning how to get Biden to step aside as the Democratic candidate for president, even though Biden’s surrogates claim he’s not going anywhere. If Biden does decide to stay atop the Democratic ticket, he’s going to be desperate to keep his base of support as intact as possible, and desperate people do dangerous things.

That’s especially true when we’re talking about politicians. So what steps could Biden take between now and November to ensure the gun control lobby spends tens of millions of dollars to promote his doomed candidacy?

We’re not going to see a gun ban or any other gun control bill approved in Congress between now and November. Biden’s options are really limited to executive branch actions, and thankfully the Supreme Court has taken a big step toward reining in executive branch overreach by overturning the Chevron Doctrine. That doesn’t mean, however, that Biden can’t propose new ATF rules, nor does today’s decision prevent the ATF from putting those rules in place. Loper Bright makes it much easier to invalidate agency overreach after the fact, but it won’t stop abuses from being implemented or enforced.

So what, if anything, could Biden do to thrill his anti-gun allies ahead of Election Day? As retired ATF deputy assistant director Pete Forcelli told Bearing Arms just a few days ago, his sources within the agency have informed him that Bidens’ White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is putting pressure on ATF director Steve Dettelbach to go after Glock by reclassifying the company’s semi-automatic pistols as “machine guns” because of the rise in illegal switches that allow semi-automatic firearms to function as fully automatic arms.

I have heard from some good sources that the White House, and don’t forget that the Office of Gun Violence Prevention is run by Rob Wilcox, who’s formerly from Everytown.

He has a lot of influence at ATF now, and I know that from a number of sources because I didn’t retire from there all that long ago. One of the things they kicked around was trying to force ATF to reclassify Glocks as machine guns, because they’re so easily converted, in their minds, to a machine gun through the use of a switch.

And people within ATF pushed back and Dettelbach didn’t bite into that fishhook and get caught on that… yet. Who knows what happens if the Biden administration has nothing to lose.

I think we’re officially at the stage of Biden not having anything to lose… at least if he doesn’t drop out of his re-election campaign altogether. Dettelach too might be more inclined to go for broke if Biden remains the nominee, knowing that he’ll be removed from his post if Donald Trump wins election.

They also contemplated putting out a ruling to gun manufacturers stating that if you sell to government entities, then you would be prohibited from selling to the civilian markets. So, think about that for a second.

ATF agents use the Glock. If Glock wanted to sign on and sell guns to the ATF or to the military, they would be prohibited from selling to the civilian market. Again, that did not happen, but these are the things that the White House is trying to push the ATF to do. It may be gently now, but once there’s no worry about being re-elected maybe it’s not such a gentle nudge.

Conversely, if there’s a huge worry about being re-elected, then maybe Biden and Dettelbach decide to roll the dice and release this proposed rule as well. Again, desperate times call for desperate measures, and Biden’s reelection bid is in dire straights right now.

Heck, even if Biden does decide to fall on his walker and allow for a candidate who can complete a sentence to replace him as the nominee, he may very well decide to give the gun control lobby these parting gifts before he leaves office. The gun control groups have been very good to him, and I’m sure he’d like to repay the favor while he still has the chance.

Whether Biden remains the Democratic candidate for president or steps aside and allows for a chaotic race to replace him, gun control activists like Wilcox are almost certain to push Biden to go big on their issue between now and Election Day, and it’s crucially important for Second Amendment advocates to keep up with their machinations behind the scenes.

Justices rule for Jan. 6 defendant

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-5572_l6hn.pdf

The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the charges against a former Pennsylvania police officer who entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the law that Joseph Fischer was charged with violating, which bars obstruction of an official proceeding, applies only to evidence tampering, such as destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings.

Friday’s ruling could affect charges against more than 300 other Jan. 6 defendants. The same law is also at the center of two of the four charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on April 25 on Trump’s claims of immunity and has not yet issued its decision in that case. But Smith has argued that even if the court were to rule for Fischer, the charges against Trump could still go forward because they rested, in part, on efforts to use false electoral certificates at the joint session of Congress.

The law at the center of Fischer’s case is 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which makes it a crime to “otherwise obstruct[], influence[], or impede[] any official proceeding.” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols concluded that because the previous subsection, Section 1512(c)(1), bars tampering with evidence “with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding,” Section 1512(c)(2) only applies to cases involving evidence tampering that obstructs an official proceeding, and he dismissed the obstruction charge against Fischer.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Nichols’ ruling, concluding that the “meaning of the statute is unambiguous,” so that it “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, other than the conduct that is already covered by” the prior subsection.

On Friday, the Supreme Court vacated the D.C. Circuit’s decision, interpreting the law more narrowly to apply only to evidence tampering.

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Overturning the Chevron Deference Could Mean a Regulatory Revolution

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

Business groups have long argued that federal agencies have too much power in their rulemaking. The Supreme Court agrees.

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the legal precedent known as the Chevron deference in a 6-3 decision, which will reshape the way that federal agencies interpret laws and craft rules that regulate a wide range of businesses.

For decades, courts have turned to regulatory agencies to fill in the legal gaps when areas of the law are ambiguous–this is the so-called Chevron deference, which emerged from case law.

The Chevron deference resulted from a 1984 case filed by Chevron, a big oil company, which argued that the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act was overly broad. Chevron lost the case after a judge found that federal agencies are considered to be the authority on a statute if it’s ambiguous. That decision brought forth the Chevron doctrine, or the Chevron deference.

The high court revisited Chevron through a pair of companion cases: Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

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SEC v. Jarkesy: A Win for the Separation of Powers and the Right to Civil Jury Trial

The Supreme Court held today that the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial in fraud cases was violated when an administrative law judge of the S.E.C. decided the case.
Chief Justice Robert wrote an excellent, thorough, and overwhelmingly persuasive majority opinion in S.E.C. v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. __ (2024), holding that the Securities and Exchange Commission could not try civil fraud suits before its own Administrative Law Judges. It must instead try them in federal District Court where the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial must be available in all cases which were “[suits] at common law,” as opposed to suits in equity and in admiralty.

The Supreme Court did today for the Seventh Amendment roughly what it did for the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). It held, in a narrow opinion, that Congress and the President cannot completely ignore the Seventh Amendment, just as they used to completely ignore the Second Amendment before Heller was decided. This is the case at least in civil fraud cases brought by the S.E.C.

The Chief Justice’s opinion was joined by five other justices: Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion examined originalist, textualist, and doctrinal sources of law. In much of the opinion, Chief Justice Roberts makes an overwhelmingly powerful argument that S.E.C. fraud cases are in the words of the Seventh Amendment “[s]uits at common law” which can only be tried by a jury and not suits in equity or admiralty where the right to jury trial has not historically been available.

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FBI ‘Active Shooter’ Stats Shoot Holes In Biden’s ‘Mass Shooting’ Argument

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, anti-gun legislators and gun-ban groups like to tout the number of mass shootings in America, often saying there have been more mass shootings in the country than there have been days in the year.

Of course, these anti-gun activists are using numbers from the Gun Violence Archives, a website known for using criteria that greatly inflates such numbers. And that’s very easy to see when compared to the just-released Federal Bureau of Investigation report on “active shooter” incidents.

GVA’s “mass shootings” criteria is all events where four or more people are injured in a shooting. These incidents are often drug gang attacks and the like—not at all what Americans think of as mass shootings. In fact, they would include a botched arrest where two cops and two suspects are shot, and even self-defense shootings! By their criteria, they reported 656 mass shootings in 2023.

The FBI, on the other hand, classifies an “active shooter” how most Americans likely envision it—“an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” By the FBI’s count, there were 48 active shooter incidents in 2023, only about 7% of the total reported by GVA and constantly regurgitated by politicians and the press.

Of course, President Biden and other gun-ban advocates have full access to the FBI report, but you never hear them talking about it. They prefer the bloated numbers from GVA, even though they aren’t a true picture of what most think of when they hear the word “mass shooting.”

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DOJ Asks Supreme Court to Resolve Question of Gun Rights for Felons

Fresh off its victory in Rahimi, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is asking the Supreme Court to clarify who it can disarm under the Second Amendment.

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed a supplemental brief with the High Court on Monday to request that the Justices make the federal felony gun ban their next Second Amendment priority. Specifically, the brief asked for review in five separate appellate court cases dealing with the federal gun ban for felonies of varying severity. She argued such a move was necessary because the Court failed to address the issue in its latest Second Amendment decision.

“Now that the Court has decided Rahimi, we believe that it should grant plenary review to resolve Section 922(g)(1) ‘s constitutionality,” the brief reads. “Although this Court’s decision in Rahimi corrects some of the methodological errors made by courts that have held Section 922(g)(1) invalid, it is unlikely to fully resolve the existing conflict.”

The DOJ’s brief is the earliest indication of the legal fallout from the Court’s decision in US v. Rahimi, which upheld the domestic violence restraining order gun ban. It suggests that the federal government is unsatisfied with the Court’s narrow ruling in that case. It is seeking further guidance from the Court that will help lower courts evaluate the extent to which certain felons retain gun rights, something federal circuit courts have been divided over since Bruen.

Instead of providing a sweeping re-evaluation of Bruen, the majority stuck closely to the specific contours of the case against defendant Zachary Rahimi.

“When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may—consistent with the Second Amendment—be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in US v. Rahimi. “Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. As applied to the facts of this case, Section 922(g)(8) fits comfortably within this tradition.”

DOJ’s request comes as the High Court considers which of its pending Second Amendment case petitions to grant. The brief’s request for expeditious review could sway the Justices to defer to the federal government’s wishes, as it has often done in past cases.

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The Message Is Plain

There are no property rights in the United States…at least, none that the State deigns to honor.

Do you remember Teresa Ghilarducci? I do. Any American who has a 401(k), an IRA, or some equivalent should know about her and her chief ambition:

     Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.
     Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.
     The testimony of Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, in hearings Oct. 7 drew the most attention and criticism. Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Ghilarducci proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration….
     The current retirement system, Ghilarducci said, “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities” because tax breaks for voluntary retirement accounts are “skewed to the wealthy because it is easier for them to save, and because they receive bigger tax breaks when they do.”…
     All workers would have 5 percent of their annual pay deducted from their paychecks and deposited to the GRA. They would still be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, as would the employers. The GRA contribution would be shared equally by the worker and the employee. Employers no longer would be able to write off their contributions. Any capital gains would be taxable year-on-year.

Socialists are forever talking about “inequality” (or in their more recent argot, “inequity”) because it affords them a pretext for seizing our money and property in pursuit of their agenda. It’s well established historically that “inequality” increases under socialism, but they’d rather we didn’t notice that. At any rate, they constantly seek rationales under which to “redistribute” what we’ve earned and saved. We must all be equally poor – except for our loving rulers, of course. Anything else would be “unfair!”

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Comment O’ The Day
Are you surprised the gooberment lied in a report? – Jessica J

Citing Fake Mass-Shooting Data, US Surgeon General Declares ‘Gun Violence’ a Public Health Crisis

United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that “gun violence” constitutes a public health crisis Tuesday but cited fake mass-shooting data from the long-debunked Gun Violence Archive to support his spurious claims.

Murthy presented his finding in a 40-page Surgeon General advisory, titled “Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America.”

“While mass shooting deaths represent only about 1% of all firearm‑related deaths in the U.S., the number of mass shooting incidents is increasing. According to data published by Gun Violence Archive, the U.S. experienced more than 600 mass shooting incidents each year between 2020 and 2023, compared to an average of less than 400 annual mass shooting incidents between 2015 and 2018,” the Surgeon General’s advisory states.

In his report, Murthy cites data from the Gun Violence Archive more than four times.

Founded in 2013, the GVA quickly became the administration’s source of choice for mass-shooting data because they hype the numbers. The small nonprofit came up with its own extremely broad definition of a mass shooting, which says anytime four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded with a firearm regardless of the circumstances, it’s a mass shooting. For example, according to the GVA there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition, which excludes gang-related and drug-related shootings, which the GVA includes in its data.

Murthy is not the only member of the Biden-Harris administration to use fake data from the GVA. Biden and his handlers have cited GVA’s mass-shooting data throughout his presidency in speeches, written statements and social media.

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ATF Whistleblower Applauds Bump Stock Ruling, Warns of Threats Ahead

Retired ATF Deputy Assistant Director Pete Forcelli, who helped blow the whistle on the Operation Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, tells Bearing Arms the Supreme Court made the right decision in striking down the agency’s ban on bump stocks, but he’s still deeply concerned that the agency is going to continue to be used by the Biden administration as a way to enact new gun control laws without getting Congress involved… especially if Joe Biden gets another four years in office.

The left likes to attack things, and the problem that I have is when the ATF is tasked by the White House or the Justice Department to attack things rather than hold the people responsible [for their crimes]. It’s not an item that causes the damage. It’s the person misusing that item. How many bump stocks have been used in shootings in the United States aside from Las Vegas? I don’t know of any, to be honest.

Of course, the bump stock ban was implemented under Donald Trump’s watch, so the right can look for simplistic solutions as well, especially in the wake of a high-profile shooting like the Route 91 Harvest Festival murders that resulted in 60 deaths and hundreds of injuries. But the Biden administration has used the ATF to do an end-run around Congress on a regular basis; first by targeting unfinished frames and receivers, then pistol stabilizing braces, and most recently gun owners who offer to sell one or more of their firearms from their personal collection.

Those are just the rules the agency has implemented. According to Forcelli, the White House has been demanding even more.

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Even CDC Admits Latest Anti-gun Report is Misleading and Full of Holes

SAF Investigative Journalism Project

Three teenage girls were alone in their Lawrence County, Kentucky home one hot summer day in 2019.

Suddenly, a white car pulled up and two men got out. One man started kicking in the front door. The second suspect circled around to the backyard and began breaking out a window with a shovel. The youngest of the girls, who was 14-years old at the time, found and loaded the family’s 9mm pistol and fired a round at one of the suspects, who both quickly left.

In 2021, a 12-year-old boy armed himself after two masked home invaders broke into his grandmother’s home demanding money. One of the suspects shot the 73-year-old woman, which prompted the youth to return fire in self-defense. Police later found one of the suspects curled up on his side in an intersection near the home. He was transported to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. The grandmother survived her wounds.

In February, a 14-year-old Houston-area teen fired six rounds at an intruder who was trying to break into his home through the front door. Police found the suspect, who was wearing gloves and carrying a backpack, in the front yard where he was pronounced dead.

None of these defensive gun usages or any others were even mentioned in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which purported to examine firearm storage data behaviors. Defensive gun usages weren’t the only data set omitted from the report. The CDC needed so many disclosures and disclaimers to tell readers what other data was missing from its research that it’s a miracle the report even was published.

The report, titled “Firearm Storage Behaviors — Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Eight States, 2021–2022,” was based on telephone interviews. The researchers called the respondents using a “random-digit–dialed landline and mobile telephone survey.” However, the authors immediately encountered four significant problems that limited the validity of their work:

  1. They were unable to determine whether firearms were stored loaded or unloaded during the phone interviews.
  2. They were only able to obtain data from the eight states, which is statistically meaningless.
  3. Some respondents did not want to disclose whether they had a firearm in their home.
  4. All of the data was self-reported to the researchers, and therefore “subject to social desirability and recall biases.”

As a result, the findings were statistical gibberish. In the handful of states that participated, the authors concluded, “18.4% – 50.6% of respondents reported the presence of a firearm in or around their home, and 19.5% – 43.8% of those with a firearm reported that at least one firearm was stored loaded.”

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