Category: Bureaucraps

ATF Has NO Authority To Change Rules & Definitions Of Guns Without Congressional Approval

The Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in a challenge of the “Final Rule” issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives redefining frames and receivers as firearms, have filed an appellee’s brief in the case, known as VanDerStok v. Garland.

The brief explains how ATF redefined the term “firearm” without any Congressional action. Last year, the agency announced a Rule expanding the definition of a firearm to include unfinished firearm components and kits used in the process of manufacturing a firearm. SAF and its partners are asserting ATF violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

A federal district court judge agreed and concluded that ATF had acted in excess of its statutory authority and granted summary judgment.

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb recently promised the organization will pursue this case “vigorously” as it winds through the court system.

“This case challenges the authority of the ATF to change rules and definitions of firearms without Congressional authority,” Gottlieb said. “We simply cannot allow any federal agency to make up its own rules as it goes along, without Congressional approval.”

SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said the foundation “expects to prevail on the portions of the Final Rule that we challenged.”

“The district court entered a judgment deeming the Rule illegal and vacating it,” Kraut said, “and we are asking the Fifth Circuit to affirm the district court’s decision to issue relief based on the APA. By promulgating the Rule, ATF has appropriated authority reserved for Congress. Such a usurpation of power is antithetical to our system of government and must be stopped.”

Federal judge refuses to moot lawsuit challenging ban on handgun purchases by under-21s

Good news out of Virginia, where a federal judge has rejected a motion by the DOJ meant to moot a challenge to the federal statute barring handgun sales to adults younger than 21. Fraser v. ATF was filed back in June of last year by John Corey Fraser, a student at Hamden-Sydney College in Farmville, and despite efforts by the DOJ to have the case dismissed, in May U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne granted summary judgment in favor of Fraser and his co-plaintiffs, ruling that the law violates the Second Amendment rights of young adults.

DOJ had argued that because federal law only prohibits the commercial sale of handguns to under-21s, their rights were still intact because they could have a parent purchase a firearm for them, or could buy a handgun themselves in a private party sale. Payne rejected that reasoning, ruling that the Second Amendment not only encompasses the right to keep and bear arms but to buy one as well: “Even though an 18-to-20-year-old can possess a gun given by a parent, the constitutional right of that 18-to-20-year-old to purchase that gun would still be implicated by the regulations.”

That favorable ruling wasn’t the end of the story, however. Even before Payne’s decision, there was an unanswered question about whether Fraser’s case could be certified as a class action, and shortly after the judge granted summary judgment, Fraser and his attorneys filed a request for an injunction halting enforcement of the statute in question. Payne instructed the two sides to confer and come to an agreement on the next steps. According to the judge, DOJ and Fraser’s attorneys couldn’t find common ground on the class certification, which doesn’t surprise me. After all, if DOJ can keep the case stalled until Fraser and the other plaintiffs all turn 21, government attorneys could argue that the case is now moot. Certifying all under-21s as a class, on the other hand, would make it impossible for plaintiffs to age out of the litigation.

Fraser has, in fact, now reached the age where he can now walk into Farmville Sporting Goods and purchase a handgun himself, but his younger brother Justin asked to be added to the list of named plaintiffs just to ensure that the case can proceed. As expected, DOJ objected to the move, arguing that the motion wasn’t filed in a timely fashion and was an “improper attempt at post-judgment intervention.”

On Thursday Judge Payne once again rejected the DOJ’s position and granted the motion for the younger Fraser to become a party to the lawsuit. In a stinging rebuke to government attorneys, Payne scoffed at DOJ’s assertion that adding Justin Fraser would prejudice their position in the case by “allowing a litigant to reap the benefits of the Court’s summary judgment ruling without having to assume the risks of litigation.”

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IRS Backdating Of Documents Highlights Festering Cultural Rot: ‘If The IRS Doesn’t Play By The Rules, They’re The Mob.’

Bloomberg, IRS Backdating Court Order Spotlights Culture, Attorneys Say:

An unusual Tax Court order requiring the IRS to report what it knew and when about misstatements in a conservation easement case, as well as mounting claims of backdating forms at the agency, are highlighting what some tax attorneys said are festering IRS cultural problems, years in the making.

The Tax Court this week ordered the IRS to identify when agency personnel found out about misstatements to the court about the date that a $15.2 million penalty against conservation easement donor LakePoint was approved. …

Rod Rosenstein, former deputy attorney general under President Donald Trump, is representing LakePoint in a FOIA lawsuit against the IRS and told Bloomberg Tax he’s reached out to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

He plans to refer to the watchdog claims made by three other partnerships—Arden Row Assets LLC, Basswood Aggregates LLC, and Delwood Resources LLC—who are asking the IRS to admit its staff backdated penalty approval forms in their cases as well.

“The question is whether we’re seeing one isolated case or whether were seeing evidence of a pattern of misconduct in IRS,” Rosenstein said. “I think if you’ve looked at these other three cases, it does suggest that there is a pattern.” …

Tax attorneys say it’s the latest chapter highlighting festering issues of IRS culture being taken over by adversarial us-versus-them attitudes at the agency. Conservation easement cases have been especially contentious [Michelle Abroms Levin, a former Justice Department Tax Division attorney,] said.

“What they have now is a win-at-all-costs culture, and I hope we can shift back to a ‘Let’s find a right answer. Let’s find the correct amount,’” she said.

[Frank Agostino, a former IRS lawyer and Department of Justice criminal prosecutor] … said this attitude is eroding much-needed trust in the institution and fueling attitudes among taxpayers that the agency is breaking the rules to extract as much money from them as it can.

“We’re not the mob, but that’s the worry,” he said of the agency. “The IRS, if they don’t play by the rules, gets the perception of being the mob.”

August 25

79 – After 2 days, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius ends.

1609 – Galileo demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1814 – On the second day of their raid on Washington D.C.,  British troops torch the Library of Congress, United States Treasury, Department of War, and many other buildings.

1875 – Captain Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to Calais, France

1894 – Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious bacteria of the bubonic plague – Yersinia pestis – and publishes his findings in British journal The Lancet.

1914 – Japan declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1916 – The United States National Park Service is created.

1942 – The Battle of the Eastern Solomons ends with U.S. aircraft from Guadalcanal sinking the Japanese destroyer Mutsuki, crippling and finally sinking the transport Kinryu Maru and damaging the cruiser Jintsu, causing the Japanese fleet to withdraw out of range at the northern Solomon islands.

1944 – Paris is liberated by the Allies.

1945 – In Xuzhou, China, Chinese Communist soldiers kill U.S. intelligence officer John Birch

1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee holds the first televised congressional hearings with Whittaker Chambers testifying against suspected spy Alger Hiss.

1950 – To avert a threatened strike during the Korean War, President Truman orders Secretary of the Army Frank Pace to seize control of the nation’s railroads.

1981 – The Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn.

1989 – The Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune

1991 – Belarus declares its independence from the Soviet Union.

2001 – American singer Aaliyah and several members of her record company are killed as their overloaded aircraft, a Cessna 402, crashes shortly after takeoff from Marsh Harbour Airport, Bahamas.

2005 – Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, before continuing on towards Louisiana, strengthening to  Category 5.

2012 – Voyager 1 becomes the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at age 82 in Cincinnati, following surgery

2017 – Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane, killing 106 people and causing $125 billion in damage.

ATF’s director says the quiet part out loud and refers to inalienable rights as a ‘privilege’

What a bizarre development in American politics that has seen the federal government cultivate and embrace a fiery disdain for the very ideals upon which itself was founded.

An item published at The Western Journal [on the 19th] reported that the ATF is intensifying its war against the pro-gun portion of the body politic; from the article:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is escalating efforts to strip gun dealers of their federal firearms licenses.

The licenses, which enable businesses to sell firearms for profit, are being revoked in increasing numbers….

The ATF has yanked 122 federal firearms licenses, or FFL’s [sic], from dealers this fiscal year alone.

That’s up from 90 in all of fiscal year 2022, and merely 27 in fiscal year 2021.

In June of 2021, Department of Injustice’s Merrick Garland announced a new “Gun Crime Prevention Strategy” which in part, focused on compliance inspections of FFL businesses. Some of the offenses which would result in “notice of [license] revocation” included:

  • Refusal to allow an IOI [Industry Operations Investigator] to conduct an inspection
  • Transferring a firearm to a prohibited person
  • Failing to conduct a required background check
  • Falsifying records
  • Failing to respond to a trace request

Now aside from the fact that the ATF has absolutely no right to exist, I know enough about the bureau to know they have one of the worst reputations out of the more than 438 federal agencies, so it’s reasonable to assume at least some of the “compliance” investigations weren’t “lawful” — as loosely as you can use that term for an agency that’s unlawfully operating. Just because the ATF calls their unreasonable searches and seizures a “request” or a compliance “inspection” doesn’t make it so; I can only wonder if 122 firearms dealers last year told federal agents to take a hike until they came back with a warrant?

According to the Western Journal article, Joe Biden’s ATF Director Steve Dettelbach said of the business owners with revoked licenses, “They’re not going to have the privilege of being a gun dealer anymore.”

Someone needs to remind Dettelbach, and every other aspiring despot in Biden’s regime, that rights come from God, not government — the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, was written to affirm this reality, and this government, this brilliant and extraordinary new government conceived in liberty and born out of a rebellion to tyrants, would guarantee that it was not a benevolent authority doling out “privileges” at it saw fit, but rather a safeguard for inalienable rights that came from a moral Authority; nothing more, and nothing less.

Of course, the Founders emphasized that human beings have a right to self-defense, or to keep and bear arms as noted in the Second Amendment, and we have a right to autonomy and privacy, or the right to be secure in our persons, houses and effects, as noted in the Fourth Amendment.

Death by bureaucracy, or regulation, is the modus operandi of the gun-grabbers. They come after the brass mines with OSHA; they use the CDC to declare “gun violence” an epidemic; they buy out reloading supplies on the market for years to come via FDA and NIH government contracts ; they choke out the points of sale with the ATF’s “Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy.”

Strangely, you rarely read news stories about the ATF targeting anybody other than the gun community; it was never really about alcohol or tobacco now was it?

Leaked Photos Show Jan 6 Prisoner Tortured, Held in Horrific Conditions for Months

New photos have been leaked from a Philadelphia prison, exposing the horrific conditions that a Jan. 6 prisoner is being subjected to.

The images show Jan. 6 prisoner Ryan Samsel pictured in the closet room he has been held in isolation for the past five months. Samsel has been held in prison without trial since January 2021.

During his two-and-a-half years in jail, Ryan has been moved around to 17 different facilities. He has been beaten, abused, tortured, and neglected since his arrest in January 2021.

The new photos were leaked from the FDC in Philadelphia to The Gateway Pundit.

The cell was a size of a closet with a light on 24 hours a day. The cell doesn’t have a bed and only offers a thin blue mattress on the floor with no sheets or blankets. With no clothing, Samsel was kept in this cell for five months straight.

In a conversation this week, Samsel told The Gateway Pundit: “I was kept in … a hard cell.

“And in that particular cell about five, six months. I even told you what was happening is the judge was actually calling, trying to get in contact with me because I wasn’t in a named cell.

“They were missing me and they were saying I wasn’t showing up to court. They were saying I wasn’t showing up to medical. But they were pretty much keeping me in there… Like I said, it was cold, the light was on, there’s zero window. And that followed me from Virginia. When I was in Virginia, it was the same exact conditions.”

Ryan described the same situation in Virginia.

“I was kept in and they called it booking hard cell, which is you get zero phone, zero commissary, zero clothing because they think that you’re going to hang yourself and you’re on constant surveillance. You’re under surveillance constantly. The light has to be on 24/7. You’re locked in a cell. There is no getting out,” he noted. The windows in Virginia were covered by a black mat, so you weren’t able to see. And it’s constant nothing. It’s deprivation of everything.”

Samsel believes the government tortured him for months so he would testify against the Proud Boys. Samsel says he was beaten numerous times and was kept locked down so he couldn’t communicate with anyone.

He is not alone, however.

Numerous Jan. 6 prisoners have been held for months in torturous conditions, dozens have been sentenced to extreme sentences for non-violent crimes. A fundraising campaign has been set up to help raise money for Sansels legal fees.

Freedom

After reading stories about the abuse suffered at the hands of police that are detaining J6 defendants for trial, knowing how cops will abuse and torture prisoners, and how they are transferring them to Supermax prisons, I am not surprised at the J6 defendants that are simply skipping out on their trials and sentencing hearings:

The people who are doing this have realized that they have nothing left to lose. Their freedom, property, and likely their lives are forfeit at this point. The cops will eventually find them, and if they aren’t killed during the arrest, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, or at least the parts of it that matter.

With nothing left to lose, it’s only a matter of time before someone in this position decides to give the left the insurrection that they are already accused of perpetrating.

Biden’s DOJ Asks SCOTUS to Gut the 2nd Amendment in 67-Page Brief

In a notable development, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has submitted a significant brief (67+ pages, embedded below) to the United States Supreme Court in the case of United States of America vs. Zaki Rahimi. The focus of this case is the constitutionality of 18 USC 922 G8, which pertains to domestic violence restraining orders and their alignment with the Second Amendment.

Mark Smith, a constitutional attorney, suggests that the DOJ, representing the Biden Administration, is arguing for extensive interpretation measures. The contention seems to be that the Second Amendment allows Congress and other legislative bodies the power to disarm individuals [aka “infringe”] deemed not “Law Abiding” or “responsible.” The criteria for such judgments, as outlined in the brief, could range from minor infractions like jaywalking to more serious criminal activities.

The broad implications of such an interpretation might leave a vast number of citizens without the right to keep and bear arms.

Central to the case is Zaki Rahimi’s incident from December 2019, where he allegedly assaulted his girlfriend and threatened a witness with a firearm. The event resulted in a restraining order against Rahimi in February 2020 after he ostensibly admitted to the accusations.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals previously held that the federal law in question in Zaki Rahimi’s case was in violation of the Second Amendment. Still, the DOJ’s arguments seem to lean heavily on connecting firearms with domestic violence, potentially setting a precedent for justifying ‘red flag’ laws. Their position leans on the Heller case from 2008, which identified the rights of “law-abiding and responsible” individuals to bear arms.

The DOJ attempts to spin its argument based on three main talking points, all taken out of legal and historical context:

  1. Previous court precedents distinguished between law-abiding citizens and those deemed otherwise.
  2. Historical precedents allowed for disarmament during the founding era, citing laws that existed during the period.
  3. Arguing that the majority of American states having similar domestic restraining orders suggests a national consensus.

Critics rightfully argue that simply because many states have implemented certain rules doesn’t automatically affirm their constitutionality.

This shocking 67-page brief from the DOJ would be a significant shift in interpreting the Second Amendment. Whether this unconstitutional human rights grab prevails will be determined by the Supreme Court in its upcoming deliberations.

Biden DOJ Legal Brief to SCOTUS in U.S. v. Rahimi

Someone with a verified disability could take New Joisey to the cleaners.

Deep Dive: New Jersey’s New ‘John Wick’ CCW Qualification Test

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Bruen Decision, which obliterated most state restrictions on the public carrying of arms and changed forever how lower courts should decide Second Amendment-related challenges to anti-gun regulations, many blue states seemingly tried to outdo each other with the number of unconstitutional post-Bruen tantrum laws they could pass. At this, New Jersey certainly lead the way, especially for its residents seeking to carry a defensive firearm.

Obtaining a New Jersey permit to carry was never easy. It is not easy now. Instead, it remains an expensive multi-step nightmare specifically designed to make the process as difficult as possible for the applicant.

Now, not only must New Jersians bend a knee, pay a fee and beg permission from the Crown to buy back their constitutional rights, they must also pass a difficult shooting test that was designed for police, not civilians, to prove they’re capable of exercising their constitutional rights to the government’s satisfaction.

Last month, the Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police in conjunction with the state’s Attorney General, issued new requirements titled “Use of Force Interim Training for Private Citizen Concealed Carry.” The document contains written material for in-person classroom training as well as the requirements for an arduous 50-round qualification course that every concealed-carry applicant must pass.

It is easy to get lost in the minutia of the qualification standards and lose sight of the big picture: New Jersey’s concealed-carry requirements are a massive infringement of the Second Amendment, which clearly violate Bruen. Does New Jersey test other constitutional rights? Do journalists there need to demonstrate competency before writing news stories? Do clergy in the Garden State need to pass state testing before delivering a sermon? Must voters prove proficiency before they’re allowed into a booth?

Clearly, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin and his state police sycophants want to hold gun owners to a higher standard than those who exercising other constitutional rights.

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So a guy pushing the Trump Russian collusion story was actually colluding with the Russians. You literally can’t make this up.

Former F.B.I. Spy Hunter Pleads Guilty to Aiding Russian Oligarch

The plea by the former agent, Charles F. McGonigal, represented a remarkable turn for a man who once occupied one of the most sensitive and trusted positions in the American intelligence community, placing him among the highest-ranking F.B.I. officials ever to be convicted of a crime.

Appearing before Judge Jennifer H. Rearden of Federal District Court on Tuesday, an emotional Mr. McGonigal stood up and said that he had broken the law after his retirement in 2018 from the bureau, where he had been an expert in Russian counterintelligence, by aiding an effort by Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire under U.S. sanctions, to investigate a rival.

“I have understood what my actions have resulted in, and I’m deeply remorseful,” Mr. McGonigal said, his voice breaking. “My actions were never intended to hurt the United States, the F.B.I. and my family and friends.”

The conspiracy charge he pleaded guilty to was newly filed by prosecutors on Tuesday, replacing the original indictment handed up by a grand jury in January that had included more serious charges of violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Under the plea deal, the maximum prison term Mr. McGonigal could serve is five years, instead of the sentence of up to 20 years he might otherwise have faced.

In court, Mr. McGonigal, 55, told the judge that he had known he could not legally perform services for Mr. Deripaska, who was placed on a U.S. sanctions list in 2018. He said he had understood that his work in the second half of 2021 to collect “open source” negative information on Vladimir Potanin, an oligarch who was a business competitor of Mr. Deripaska, was likely to be used in an effort to get Mr. Potanin placed on the sanctions list as well.

He admitted knowingly arranging for payments to be routed from a Russian bank through a company in Cyprus, and then to a corporation in New Jersey, to conceal that the source of the money was Mr. Deripaska.

Judge Rearden scheduled Mr. McGonigal’s sentencing for Dec. 4.

In the initial charging document, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said that Mr. McGonigal and an associate had received payments totaling more than $200,000 for their work investigating Mr. Potanin under a contract with an aide to Mr. Deripaska. They also hired subcontractors for the investigation, the indictment said.

But on Tuesday, Mr. McGonigal told the judge that in the end he had netted only $17,500, and he agreed to forfeit that amount.

The plea brings the prosecution of Mr. McGonigal in New York to a relatively speedy conclusion after fewer than seven months. He had been arrested by F.B.I. agents in January at John F. Kennedy Airport upon his return from an overseas business trip.

Mr. McGonigal still faces a second indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Washington on charges that accuse him of concealing his acceptance of $225,000 from a businessman and of hiding dealings in Eastern Europe while working for the bureau. Mr. McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to those charges but is in talks to resolve them; his lawyer, Seth D. DuCharme, told the judge overseeing the Washington case that he expected to provide an update on the talks after Labor Day.

Although Mr. McGonigal was privy to highly classified information, a three-year investigation found no evidence that he had passed secrets to foreign adversaries, according to people with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing matter. The F.B.I. concluded that Mr. McGonigal’s misconduct was limited to corruption, the people said.

Mr. Deripaska, who has been called “Putin’s oligarch” because of his close relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is among the best known of the businessmen who became rich as Russian state resources were doled out to friends of the Kremlin after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Deripaska and others were also accused last year by federal prosecutors in New York of violating U.S. sanctions through real-estate deals and other actions, including trying to arrange for the oligarch’s girlfriend to give birth to their two children in the United States. Mr. Deripaska, a Russian citizen, is unlikely to be extradited to face the charges in the near future.

The prosecutors in Mr. McGonigal’s New York case have said that before the U.S. government expanded sanctions in 2018, following Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election, Mr. McGonigal had reviewed a preliminary sanctions list with Mr. Deripaska’s name on it. Around the same time, they suggested, Mr. McGonigal was seeking a connection with Mr. Deripaska by arranging a New York Police Department internship for the daughter of one of the oligarch’s aides. (A senior police official has said it was actually a “V.I.P.-type tour.”)

After Mr. McGonigal retired, he and his co-defendant in the New York case, a court interpreter and former Russian diplomat named Sergey Shestakov, referred the same Deripaska aide to a law firm for help getting sanctions removed, according to the original charges in New York.

While negotiating the law firm agreement, Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska in Vienna and London, referring to him in electronic communications as “the Vienna client,” prosecutors have said. Mr. Deripaska paid the law firm $175,000 a month; the firm passed $25,000 on to Mr. McGonigal as a consultant and investigator, the prosecutors said.

Mr. Shestakov has pleaded not guilty to violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering, conspiracy and making false statements to the F.B.I. His lawyer, Rita M. Glavin, did not respond to a request for comment.

The deal to investigate Mr. Potanin was made with an aide to Mr. Deripaska in the spring of 2021, prosecutors said.

In November of that year, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov were trying to obtain “dark web” files, purportedly about $500 million in hidden assets held by Mr. Potanin, in exchange for a payment of up to $3 million, Rebecca Talia Dell, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court Tuesday. Before that transaction could be completed, F.B.I. agents seized Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov’s electronic devices, bringing their work for Mr. Deripaska to an end, prosecutors have said.

Conservation Orgs File Intent to Sue Education Dept. Over Archery & Hunter Education Policies

On Friday, August 11, 2023, Safari Club International, along with the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation, sent a notice of intent to sue the Department of Education over the Department’s misinterpretation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), which would prohibit the use of federal funds for shooting sports, hunter education, and outdoor education programs in schools.

Co-sponsors and authors of the BSCA have repeatedly confirmed that it was not intended to restrict funding for these programs. Rather, these programs are vital to helping students find safe and healthy outlets—and to develop a love of the outdoors.

SCI and SAF’s notice of intent to sue warns the Department that its interpretation of the BSCA is arbitrary and capricious, in violation of federal law. It requests a response within ten days, or the organizations will have no choice but to file suit. These shooting sports and hunter education programs are far too important to allow this funding uncertainty to continue.

“SCI is disheartened by the Administration’s lack of urgency in correcting their misinterpretation of the BSCA,” said Ben Cassidy, SCI EVP of International Government and Public Affairs. “Congress has repeatedly confirmed that this was not the BSCA’s intent. The Department mustunderstand there are consequences for ignoring the crucial role these programs play in helping kids learn new skills, enjoy the outdoors, and understand the importance of conservation.”

“SCI Foundation has been dedicated to providing shooting sports and outdoor education programs since 1976,” said SCI and SCI Foundation CEO W. Laird Hamberlin. “Nearly 7,000 educators have been trained in conservation/outdoor education and shooting sports, reaching over 1 million children nationwide. In addition, the Foundation, as well as SCI chapters, have invested millions of dollars in funding archery, hunter education, and outdoor education in schools. The Department’s incorrect interpretation of this the BSCA has put all those programs in jeopardy.”

In addition to a suit, SCI is working with members of Congress to amend the law, to ensure misinterpretations like this cannot happen again. SCI’s Hunter Advocacy Action Center alert provides a direct link to contact Members of Congress, to demand urgent change.

More Background:

The increasing futility of gun control in a 3D printing world
“You can’t stop the signal”

Inexpensive Add-on Spawns a New Era of Machine Guns

Caison Robinson, 14, had just met up with a younger neighbor on their quiet street after finishing his chores when a gunman in a white car rolled up and fired a torrent of bullets in an instant.

“Mom, I’ve been shot!” he recalled crying, as his mother bolted barefoot out of their house in northwest Las Vegas. “I didn’t think I was going to make it, for how much blood was under me,” Caison said.

The Las Vegas police say the shooting in May was carried out with a pistol rigged with a small and illegal device known as a switch. Switches can transform semiautomatic handguns, which typically require a trigger pull for each shot, into fully automatic machine guns that fire dozens of bullets with one tug.

By the time the assailant in Las Vegas sped away, Caison, a soft-spoken teenager who loves video games, lay on the pavement with five gunshot wounds. His friend, a 12-year-old girl, was struck once in the leg.

These makeshift machine guns — able to inflict indiscriminate carnage in seconds — are helping fuel the national epidemic of gun violence, making shootings increasingly lethal, creating added risks for bystanders and leaving survivors more grievously wounded, according to law enforcement authorities and medical workers.

The growing use of switches, which are also known as auto sears, is evident in real-time audio tracking of gunshots around the country, data shows. Audio sensors monitored by a public safety technology company, Sound Thinking, recorded 75,544 rounds of suspected automatic gunfire in 2022 in portions of 127 cities covered by its microphones, according to data compiled at the request of The New York Times. That was a 49 percent increase from the year before.

“This is almost like the gun version of the fentanyl crisis,” Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Mo., said in an interview.

Mr. Lucas, a Democrat, said he believes that the rising popularity of switches, especially among young people, is a major reason fewer gun violence victims are surviving in his city.

Homicides in Kansas City are approaching record highs this year, even as the number of nonfatal shootings in the city has decreased.

Switches come in various forms, but most are small Lego-like plastic blocks, about an inch square, that can be easily manufactured on a 3-D printer and go for around $200.

Law enforcement officials say the devices are turning up with greater frequency at crime scenes, often wielded by teens who have come to see them as a status symbol that provides a competitive advantage. The proliferation of switches also has coincided with broader accessibility of so-called ghost guns, untraceable firearms that can be made with components purchased online or made with 3-D printers.

“The gang wars and street fighting that used to be with knives, and then pistols, is now to a great extent being waged with automatic weapons,” said Andrew M. Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota.

Switches have become a major priority for federal law enforcement officials. But investigators say they face formidable obstacles, including the sheer number in circulation and the ease with which they can be produced and installed at home, using readily available instruction videos on the internet. Many are sold and owned by people younger than 18, who generally face more lenient treatment in the courts.

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GOP Senators Condemn Biden Admin’s Misapplication of Gun Control Law

A group of 19 Republican Senators led by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) sent a letter to President Biden Friday criticizing the attempt to use the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to justify withholding funds from schools that have hunting and/or archery programs.

Breitbart News reported on July 28 that Biden was blocking funds for elementary schools that had hunting and/or archery programs.

FOX News noted there are certain funds earmarked for archery and hunting programs via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. But the Biden Administration had allegedly begun claiming that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, secured in the summer of 2022, “[precluded] school hunting and archery classes…from receiving federal funding.”

Sen Barrasso and his colleagues explain that they opposed the gun control when it was passed and signed into law, and they oppose its use to deny funding to schools now.

Barrasso wrote: “The Biden Administration’s purposeful misinterpretation of the gun control bill is attempting to take away valuable programs from students across the country. Hunter education and archery programs are beneficial to students both in rural and urban areas.”

He and his colleagues also noted that the attack against programs for elementary school children is part of a larger animosity against hunters and archers in general: “It is now clearer than ever that the Biden Administration will use the [gun control] bill to attack the constitutional right of Americans. Hunting and archery are strongly connected to the traditions and heritage of America. This outrageous overreach is an attack on hunters and outdoor recreation that must be addressed.”

Barasso and his colleagues called on the Biden Administration to do an about-face on blockage of funding: “We call on the Biden Administration to immediately withdraw the guidance and support these essential programs.”

On Friday Breitbart News noted Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) fired back at the Biden Administration for withholding money from elementary schools in his state, noting that the woke leftists who defunded the police are now defunding school hunting and archery programs.

California bill would make questioning school board members a crime

California is poised to codify at the state level what the feds were once requested to do — that is, turn inquisitive parents into criminals for daring to question their school board representatives.

Senate Bill 596, introduced by Democratic State Senator Anthony Portantino in February and dubbed the “School Employees: Protection” act, expands an existing law “which makes it a misdemeanor for any ‘person’ to threaten or harass a school employee during the ‘course of [their] duties,’” according to the California Globe.

This expansion adds a penalty for creating a “substantial disorder” at any meeting of a public school board, charter school board, county board of education, and the California State Board of Education.

Although “substantial disorder” is not precisely defined, the bill notes that “course of conduct” is “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts over a period of time, however short … evidencing a continuity of purpose.”

Gone from the definition of “harassment” is “unlawful violence” and “credible threat of violence,” and in its place is “torments, or terrorizes.”

It’s not difficult to figure out what’s happening here. A concerned parent at a school board meeting asks a board member a question and reiterates it (thereby establishing a “course of conduct”) … and if the board member feels “tormented” the parent can be arrested and charged with a fine between $500 and $1,000 and face up to a year in jail.

Or, as the Globe’s Kenny Snell (a retired longtime teacher) put it, “In California-speak, that means school boards get to decide what is substantial and what is not; what is harassment and what is not. In Totalitarian-speak that means don’t dare even think about going to a school board meeting and question their narrative or policies.”

Keep in mind that last year the National School Boards Association — in collaboration with the Biden administration — wanted the U.S. Department of Justice to label outspoken parents “domestic terrorists” and the National Guard to monitor school board meetings.

The NSBA had complained of “acts of malice” and “aggression” by parents — eerily similar to the California bill’s “torments.”

Two other pieces of concerning legislation in the Golden State noted by the California Policy Center include Corey Jackson’s (D) Assembly Bill 1078 and Mia Bonta’s Assembly Bill 1352.

The former would give local school boards’ power to make curriculum decisions to education bureaucrats in the state capital, while the latter “would allow a duly elected school board member to be removed from office if he or she disagrees with the votes of teachers union-backed board members.”

NC officials want more oversight on concealed-carry training. Gun-rights advocates are suspicious
The state has recently found itself unable to take action against firearms training instructors who allegedly showed up to teach classes drunk, or allowed people to get a concealed carry permit without proving they knew how to use their handgun.

Dozens of Second Amendment advocates drove into Raleigh from across the state Wednesday, voicing their objections to proposed rules that would create more oversight of those who train people to carry concealed handguns in the state.

State law enforcement officials say they’ve recently found themselves unable to take action against firearms training instructors who allegedly showed up to teach classes drunk, or allowed people to get a concealed-carry permit without proving they actually knew how to use a gun.

“We have had lots of recent allegations against instructors,” Leslie Dismukes, who leads the state Department of Justice’s criminal bureau, said as she kicked off Wednesday’s public hearing at a Wake Tech public safety training center. She added: “It can be dangerous for all citizens if instructors are not following the rules.”

For that reason the state commission in charge of setting rules for concealed-carry permits now wants instructors to keep more paperwork that will make it easier for state investigators to audit concealed-carry classes, or track down class attendees if needed as witnesses.

Many of the concealed-carry instructors and other pro-gun activists who showed up Wednesday were clear that they opposed giving the government more ability to investigate them — especially if it meant they’d have to keep a list of the people who take their classes, which one of the new rules proposes.

“We are against state and federal regulations as much as possible,” said David McFarling, president of the North Carolina Rifle and Pistol Association. “We have to oppose most of these things just on general principle.”

Politics at play
Like any debate on guns, the opposition was firmly rooted in politics — especially with North Carolina’s 2024 race for governor fast approaching.

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The squish Roberts does it again

Supreme Court allows continued regulation of so-called ‘ghost guns’
The Biden administration may temporarily continue its crackdown on ‘ghost guns’

The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the Biden administration, temporarily allowing enforcement of regulations over so-called “ghost guns” that can be made from kits at home.

The administration appealed a federal judge’s earlier ruling tossing out the regulations. In a 5-4 vote, the high court put that ruling from Texas on hold while the case is appealed further on the merits. The regulation will be enforced while the case is appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and possibly further to the Supreme Court.

Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh would have allowed the lower court ruling to go into effect.

The federal regulation was put into place a year ago, and would put ghost guns under the same control as other fully assembled firearms, making it easier to trace serial numbers, background checks, and sales. The rule requires unfinished parts of a firearm like the frame of a handgun or the receiver of a long gun to be treated like a completed firearm. These parts need to be licensed and must have serial numbers.

The rule also requires manufacturers to run background checks before selling these parts, as they are required to do for whole commercial firearms.

The Biden administration argued the rule is necessary to respond to rising numbers of untraceable guns.

The Justice Department had told the court that local law enforcement agencies seized more than 19,000 ghost guns at crime scenes in 2021, a more than tenfold increase in just five years.

“The public-safety interests in reversing the flow of ghost guns to dangerous and otherwise prohibited persons easily outweighs the minor costs that respondents will incur,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote in a court filing.

Gun rights groups and a firearms parts manufacturer challenging the regulation argue the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) lacks the authority to change the definition of a firearm in federal law without an act of Congress. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in Fort Worth, Texas, sided with plaintiffs challenging the rule last June, finding that the definition of a firearm in federal law does not cover the individual parts of a gun.

Lawyers for the Firearms Policy Coalition told the Supreme Court that O’Connor was right and that ATF had abandoned more than half a century of regulatory practice by expanding the definition of a firearm.

“We’re deeply disappointed that the Court pressed pause on our defeat of ATF’s rule effectively redefining ‘firearm’ and ‘frame or receiver’ under federal law,” said Cody J. Wisniewski, FPCAF’s General Counsel and Vice President of Legal, and FPC’s counsel in this case. “Regardless of today’s decision, we’re still confident that we will yet again defeat ATF and its unlawful rule at the Fifth Circuit when that Court has the opportunity to review the full merits of our case.”