NSSF Wins Preliminary Injunction Against California Law Allowing Frivolous Lawsuits Against Gun Industry

A U.S. District Judge has granted an injunction prohibiting the enforcement of California’s law that exposes firearms manufacturers and retailers to lawsuits in the state for lawful commerce in firearms that takes place entirely outside the state of California when those legally made and sold products are misused by criminals and others.

The ruling by Judge Schopler in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California enjoined the enforcement of California AB 1594, the so-called “Firearm Industry Responsibility Act.” NSSF sued to challenge the law in June 2023 and moved for an injunction. In granting the injunction, Judge Schopler found the law is likely unconstitutional because it violates the Commerce Clause.

“We are thankful the court enjoined the state from suing members of the firearm industry under this unconstitutional law that attempts to use the real threat of liability on commerce beyond California’s borders and impose its policy choices on its sister states,” stated NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence G. Keane.

Among other provisions, California AB 1594 bans the manufacture, sale and marketing of firearms the state deems “abnormally dangerous.” It allows civil lawsuits against a firearm industry member to be filed by the Attorney General, any municipality and any person who claims to have suffered harm from the misuse of a legal, lawfully sold firearm by a remote third party. The law unconstitutionally invades the sovereignty of sister states by directly regulating lawful commerce occurring entirely outside the state of California in violation of the Commerce Clause and the United States’ system of federalism. The law also violates the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) enacted by Congress in 2005 to stop just these sorts of frivolous lawsuits against members of the industry.

“We are reviewing the balance of the court’s decision and whether we will file an amended complaint to provide the court more details on how California’s unconstitutional law and its threat of crushing liability is causing real and ongoing harm to members of our industry,” Keane said.

NSSF also claims in its lawsuit that the law also infringes on the Second Amendment and chills First Amendment rights by restricting protected free-speech advertising of Constitutionally-protected products that are lawfully made and sold – even when that advertising takes place outside of California’s borders.

Christian Right Gonna Get Yo Momma

In its never-ending rebellion against Greco-Roman/Western civilization and the philosophy of the late 18th century, the international Left has come up with a new bete noire: “Christian Nationalism.”

As part of its ongoing series, called Exploring Hate, PBS has produced a documentary on the subject, “The Rise of Christian Nationalism.” Rob Reiner, aka Meathead from All In the Family from centuries ago, has just flopped with an anti-Christian film, God and Country, with a miserable four-day opening box-office haul of just $38, 415. Meanwhile, David French, the former conservative who appears as a talking head in Reiner’s movie, has just written an explainer, “What is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?” at the mother ship of Woke Stalinist orthodoxy, the devoutly anti-Christian New York Times:

The problem with Christian nationalism isn’t with Christian participation in politics but rather the belief that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law. It can manifest itself through ideology, identity and emotion. And if it were to take hold, it would both upend our Constitution and fracture our society.

George begs to differ.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids.

Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

Most atheist Leftists have no understanding of the many and manifest differences between and among Christian sects, foremost among them split between Roman Catholics and the various Protestant sects — Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Seventh-Day Adventists, et al. — once fundamental to early America but now waning in numbers and influence. Consider the wording of Saul Alinsky’s noxious but effective Rule No. 4: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

That there is no “Christian church” doesn’t matter to someone like Alinsky one bit; he only sees one Principal Enemy (as the Soviets used to call the U.S.). But it is against this wing of Christendom — as it happens, the wing of most of the Founders who understood they were creating a new nation based upon Christian principles and the wisdom of the British Enlightenment — that the hostility against “Christian Nationalism” is directed.

When the Founders established the protective notion of freedom of religion and the proscription against a religious test for office, the context was the rivalry and animosity between the Protestant sects and Catholicism, and with the understanding that the small Jewish community could be free to worship as it chose as well. It’s worth remembering that the Constitution’s prohibition against an “establishment of religion” referred to the establishment nationwide of a single Protestant sect (or, God forbid, Catholicism) — and yet the states were perfectly free to have established churches: Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, which were constitutionally Congregationalist into the 19th century.

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WATCH: Biden Says ‘I Wanna Get This Quote Exactly Right’ Before Hilariously Failing

“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is,” said Vice President Dan Quayle more than 30 years ago, mangling the United Negro College Fund’s classic slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Quayle’s mistake was all over the news, the late-night talk shows, and whatever stupid place people used to go to before we had Twitter/X.

With that in mind, assuming we haven’t all lost ours, let us dig into the latest word salad from Presidentish Joe Biden, lovingly tossed and dressed with generous portions of Hidden Memory Ranch Dressing.

“Standing here in front of this portrait [Abraham Lincoln] of the man behind me,” because that’s how being in front of things works, “he, uh, he said — and I want to make sure I get the quote exactly right…”

If you aren’t already thinking that this is when Biden completely mangled the quote he was trying so hard to get exactly right, then I don’t think we can be friends any longer.

Biden continued, reading from his prepared notes, “He said, the better angel, he said, we must address the council and adjust the better angels of our nature. ”

When the better angel of your nature is in need of an adjustment, please take it to see a licensed chiropractor. I’m not sure what Biden meant about addressing the council in this context, but since he graduated ahead of the valedictorian in his top-tier Super Brain Law School class at Syracuse University, I’ll defer to his greater knowledge about such legal matters.

I would like to reiterate before we get to this next part that Biden was reading from note cards.

“And we do, and we do well to remember what else he said,” the alleged current president continued. “He said we’re not enemies but we’re friends. It’s in the middle, in the, in the middle part of the Civil War.”

Lincoln’s words — not Biden’s 40-grit sandpaper approximation of them — were delivered at his first inaugural in March of 1861, about five weeks before the first battle of the Civil War was fought at Fort Sumter. But whatever. Biden means well, except when he’s calling half of the country election-denying white supremacists bent on destroying our democracy.

“He said,” Biden repeating himself and still not mentioning Lincoln by name, “we’re not enemies, we’re friend [sic]. We must not be enemies.”

“We’ve gotten, politics has gotten too bitter,” he concluded for the benefit of you knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, MAGA extremists.

What Biden had meant to say, of course, was this — or at least the first and last parts:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln, unlike our current Super Mind Brain POTUS, was an actual genius — and even a poet.

If you think I’ve exaggerated anything Biden said, watch the clip for yourself. Watching it is worse than reading it because, except for a well-delivered flash of humor at the end, my transcript doesn’t show you how weak and confused Biden sounded.

For the record, I’m not laughing at an old man’s misfortune — I’m laughing at ours.

Gun Control Activists Claim to Have the ‘Spirit of the Law’ on Their Side in Bump Stock Case

Which, of course, is another way of saying that they don’t have the letter of the law on their side. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Cargill v. Garland on Wednesday, and the fundamental question before the Court is whether a bump stock device is a “machinegun” as defined in 26 U.S.C. 5845(b) because it is designed and intended for use in converting a rifle into a machinegun, which, under federal law, is “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.”

For years the ATF approved bump stocks for sale, but after the Route 91 festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, the agency reversed course and banned the product, declaring that its prior determinations did “not reflect the best interpretation of the term ‘machinegun.’ The ATF concluded that the phrase “single function of the trigger” also encompasses a “‘single pull of the trigger,’” and even “motions ‘analogous’ to a single pull; an argument persuasive to a couple of federal appellate courts, but not the Fifth Circuit, which ruled that the ATF’s new definition stretched far beyond what the federal statute in question actually says.

Ahead of Wednesday’s court hearing, both sides are using the press to make their case, with ABC News set to run a report on bump stocks on Primetime Live tonight. The network spoke to Michael Cargill, who’s leading the charge to have the ATF’s current rules overturned, along with bump stock creator Jeremiah Cottle, survivors of the Las Vegas shooting, and several gun control activists who inadvertently helped demonstrate the weakness of the government’s argument.

Steve Kling, a retired Army commander of a small arms training unit and a gun safety advocate for the Giffords organization, said ATF’s reversal reflects a more accurate analysis of federal law.

“The spirit of the law is to prevent automatic weapons, weapons that have a significant cyclical rate of fire, from being on our streets and possessed by just anyone,” he said.

“I’ve fired a lot of automatic weapons, including ones with bump stocks. There’s no question that they’re fun. It’s fun to drive a supercar at 180 miles an hour down a highway. But we don’t allow that either,” Kling said.

Again, a firearm equipped with a bump stock isn’t an “automatic” weapon, no matter how much Kling believes otherwise. And while we may not allow drivers to go 180 mph, we also don’t ban cars that can go that fast (though California lawmakers are giving it their best shot).

That doesn’t mean that bump stocks can’t be banned, but doing so would require congressional action, not an executive branch agency deciding to re-interpret the plain language of the National Firearms Act in order to retroactively prohibit the possession of a lawfully purchased and possessed product.

Michael Cargill, an Army veteran and owner of Central Texas Gun Works outside Austin, cleared his store shelves of bump stocks after the ATF imposed the 2018 ban and surrendered two he owned himself. But he sued the agency in federal court and is leading the fight to get the devices back.

“This is a product that I legally purchased and had it in the store,” Cargill said in an interview at his shop, “and all of a sudden an agency within the federal government decided they’re going to ban this particular product. I said, ‘This is crazy, this is not the America that I know. We’ve got to do something about this.'”

Cargill insists a bump stock is a firearm accessory that does not render a semi-automatic weapon fully automatic and that the ATF overstepped its authority. He’s now asking the Supreme Court to strike down the agency’s ban.

“We need to follow the laws that we already have right now and not venture past that point,” Cargill said. “An agency within the federal government can’t come out and actually turn millions of people into felons overnight or ban a product. We have to go to Congress to do that.”

As the National Shooting Sports Foundation argued in its amicus brief in Cargill, the bump stock ban is hardly the only example of ATF overreach in recent year.

Time and again in recent years, ATF has executed similar about-faces in service of restricting access to firearms with features it had previously recognized to be legal. The agency has tried to justify those efforts by taking an increasingly broad view of the “purpose” of the federal statutes setting forth its important but limited mission and an increasingly narrow view of the constraints that those statutes impose.

Making matters worse, ATF has largely given the Second Amendment the back of the hand, imposing novel firearms restrictions without seriously grappling with constitutional text or historical tradition. The agency is in dire need of a reminder that it is not for ATF to decide which arms the people may keep and bear.

If the Court upholds the ATF’s action here, the decision could not only have implications for the agency’s more recent rules on unfinished frames and receivers and pistol stabilizing braces, but would give the green light for the ATF to rewrite entire sections of the NFA and Gun Control Act to create a host of new gun control laws without a vote in Congress. This case is hugely important, not only for the hundreds of thousands of people who lawfully purchased bump stocks in the past, but for every gun owner in the country going forward. Gun control activists may believe that the spirit of the law is on their side, but if SCOTUS remains true to the letter of the law, which they’re supposed to do, then I don’t think they have any choice but to strike down the ATF’s rule and remind the agency that it’s the role of Congress to create new law, not government agencies.

Know your islamist enemy

 

Joe Biden Tries to Give a Massive Gift to Hamas, Israel Tells Him to Pound Sand

When conservatives were telling Democrats to “back the blue,” I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean like this. According to a new report, the Biden administration is demanding that Israel stop targeting the Hamas-controlled police forces in Gaza.

That comes as Israel continues its push into the southern part of the territory where the remnants of Hamas remain. It also comes amidst reports (including video evidence) of these “police forces” shooting civilians to facilitate the stealing of aid for the terrorists holed up there.

The Biden administration asked Israel to stop targeting members of the Hamas-run civilian police force who escort aid trucks in Gaza, warning that a “total breakdown of law and order” is significantly exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the enclave, three U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios.

Why it matters: U.S. officials say they are increasingly concerned “that Gaza is turning into Mogadishu” as a security vacuum and desperation have opened the door for armed gangs to attack and loot aid trucks, putting even more pressure on the Strip’s already strained humanitarian system.

In late December, a video emerged of a Hamas police officer shooting and killing a young boy for trying to take food from one of the aid trucks. Since then, numerous reports have emerged of civilians being shot while the trucks are escorted through starving crowds. Little if no international condemnation has followed the incidents, and apparently, Joe Biden is just fine with it.

This is akin to the Allied Powers in World War II being commanded to not kill members of the Gestapo to ensure they can “maintain order.” There is no actual “civilian police force” in Gaza. They are all supportive of Hamas. They all commit and/or allow atrocities against innocent people, and they are all facilitating the theft of aid that is only prolonging the war.

So naturally, Biden is all for doing what it takes to knee-cap Israel and help keep that status quo in place. We are talking about the worst foreign policy mind in American political history when considering the breadth of time his penchant for failure has presided over. If there’s a bad decision to be made, Biden is going to be there to make it.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of hearing about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza sans any context, as if it gets solved by leaving Hamas in power. This can all end tomorrow if the terrorist government simply agrees to go into exile and lets some kind of coalition demilitarize the territory. That’s the way to help the people in Rafah right now. The way to not help them is to preserve the “police force” that is helping exacerbate their situation.

Smartly, Israel told Biden to pound sand.

But Israel rebuffed the request because one of its goals in the war is to ensure that Hamas no longer runs Gaza, two Israeli officials said.

Israel is also looking to cooperate with those in Gaza who oppose Hamas to facilitate aid instead of relying on the very terrorists they are fighting to deliver it. That would seem like a common sense approach given the entire point of the war is to depose Hamas. Perhaps that’s too complicated for the Biden administration to understand.

Any “solution” to the war in Gaza that doesn’t include the complete removal of Hamas as a governing force is not a solution. It’s simply a massive gift to terrorists who will inevitably strike again, leading to yet another war and yet more death and destruction. The United States, Europe, and the dictators at the UN can either figure that out or get out of the way.

Judge Declares Fargo’s Ban on Home-Based Gun Businesses Goes Too Far

For several years the city of Fargo, North Dakota has prohibited FFL’s from operating out of their homes, but the state legislature took aim at that restriction last year and passed a law that bans localities from establishing zoning ordinances that specifically include firearms and ammunition based businesses.

The city almost immediately filed suit challenging the law, but this week state District Judge Cherie Clark ruled against Fargo; tossing out the city’s lawsuit and rejecting its argument that the zoning preemption law violates the state constitution and the home rule powers granted to local authorities.

“While the Court agrees that (the North Dakota Constitution) intends for ‘maximum local self-government,’ the law is not settled that this language alone provides home rule cities the right to legislate on topics the state legislature has limited,” the judge wrote.

But she also expressed concerns about the Legislature’s actions: “If the legislature continues to pare home rule powers, home rule cities lack the discretion to address important issues impacting their respective and unique communities.”

What, exactly, is so unique about Fargo that federal firearms licensees shouldn’t be allowed to operate a home-based business? The city has never offered a good explanation, instead blithely asserting that it “does not want its residents to utilize their homes in residential areas as gun stores.”

Well, tough. There’s no prohibition in either state or federal law that precludes home-based FFLs, and it doesn’t appear that any other locality in the state has tried to erect any similar barriers, so why should FFLs in Fargo be punished or forced to spend money on a brick-and-mortar location, especially if they’re selling guns on a part-time basis?

This is actually the second law that the state legislature has adopted to deal with Fargo’s restrictions, but the city was successful in defending its ordinance in 2021, which led lawmakers to try again last year.

Bill sponsor and Republican state Rep. Ben Koppelman told a state Senate panel in April that the issue came to greater attention in 2016 when, because of the ordinance, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives refused to renew the federal firearms licenses of Fargo dealers who sold out of their homes.

“What is at issue is whether we want local governments creating gun control or whether we want gun regulations to remain a state-controlled issue,” Koppelman said in April. “Without this bill and in light of the (2021) court opinion, I think local political subdivisions could propose all sorts of local gun control, and based on the anti-gun track record of the City of Fargo Commission, I think we could expect it.”

Both sides in the lawsuit agree that the issue at hand goes beyond the zoning laws in question, and instead touches on the ability of home-rule localities to pass their own laws in any number of areas. But even though the North Dakota Constitution compelled the state legislature to come up with a home-rule statute and lawmakers granted home-rule communities the authority to adopt ordinances, resolutions, and regulations that provide for public health, safety, morals, and welfare, it’s still within the state’s authority to declare certain subjects off-limits to local control.

Three years ago the legislature adopted a preemption law stating:

1. A political subdivision, including home rule cities or counties, may not enact a zoning ordinance or any other ordinance relating to the purchase, sale, ownership, possession,transfer of ownership, registration, or licensure of firearms and ammunition which is more restrictive than state law. All such existing ordinances are void.

A state judge ruled that Fargo’s home-based FFL zoning prohibition could still be enforced because the state had no regulations concerning commercial firearms sales. While most of us would conclude that any zoning ordinance would be more restrictive than a state law that doesn’t exist, District Judge Stephannie Nicole Stiel sided with Fargo’s argument that the ordinance in question wasn’t more restrictive than state law because state statutes were silent on commercial gun sales sales.

That’s not the case these days, thanks to the legislature’s response last year, and Judge Clark made the right call, even though her editorializing on the legislature’s actions was completely unnecessary. Fargo officials could still appeal Clark’s decision, but the odds of success are pretty long, and it would be a waste of time and taxpayer money to try to keep this needless ordinance in place instead of accepting home-based FFLs and the tax revenue they generate.

The Honorable Judge Benitez strikes again.

The state court mistakenly did not regard the pistol or the billy to be the sorts of arms protected by the Second Amendment. Instead, only weapons of war were covered by the Constitution, according to Workman. As to other kinds of arms, Workman incorrectly observed,

in regard to the kind of arms referred to in the [Second] amendment, it must be held to refer to the weapons of warfare to be used by the militia, such as swords, guns, rifles, and muskets,—arms to be used in defending the State and civil liberty,—and not to pistols, bowie-knife, brass knuckles, billies, and such other weapons . . . .

In short, Workman held that weapons of war are protected by the Second Amendment but found weapons like the billy are not weapons of war, and therefore are not protected.

Workman was wrong in concluding the Second Amendment does not cover arms like the pistol and the billy.…

The Second Amendment protects a citizen’s right to defend one’s self with dangerous and lethal firearms. But not everybody wants to carry a firearm for self defense. Some prefer less-lethal weapons. A billy is a less-lethal weapon that may be used for self-defense.

It is a simple weapon that most anybody between the ages of eight and eighty can fashion from a wooden stick, or a clothes pole, or a dowel rod. One can easily imagine countless citizens carrying these weapons on daily walks and hikes to defend themselves against attacks by humans or animals. To give full life to the core right of self-defense, every law-abiding responsible individual citizen has a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms like the billy for lawful purposes.

gov.uscourts.casd.644922.86.0

America Has a State-Approved Domestic Terrorism Problem

During my internet perusing, I came across a post from comedian Kurt Metzger who had one of his shows canceled, alongside a few other comedians, at a comedy venue called “Capitol Hill” in Seattle. Why?

Because these comedians didn’t have the same “progressive” values as the surrounding community. Metzger notes that this comedy club is in the same district where the failed “CHAZ” encampment was created. You may recall that CHAZ was an attempt at creating an independent country with America based on the communist system that ended up being a place of murder, destruction, and flat-out idiocy.

These were communists, after all, but I digress.

Metzger posted the email he received about the cancelation of his show in full. Give it a read, and as you read it, try to notice the tone of it.

The letter isn’t rude or condescending, or at least it doesn’t come off that way. After reading it a few times, it comes off more as being written out of fear.

Notice the language being used in it. Emphasis mine.

“…we’ve received significant feedback expressing concerns about the alignment of these upcoming shows with the neighborhood’s ethos.”

“Given the feedback and to avoid any potential negative impact on both our club and the artists involved, as well as to maintain harmony within our community…”

“…we want to ensure it does not reflect on your talent and the quality of your work but is instead a reflection of our commitment to our community’s values.”

This reads like a letter that the writer, Jes Anderson, didn’t want to write. It’s incredibly complimentary to the comedians and it’s clear that they do not want to close the door on them forever, but there’s repeated language that reads like appeasement and assurances that they’re on the same side of the community in question.

This is a letter that they knew would be read by multiple groups, not just the comedians and the ticket holders. Looking at it closely, this letter looks more like someone trying to avert the very literal destruction of their club and harm of their employees, patrons, and talent than it does anything else.

If this was a city where the politicians and local law enforcement didn’t tolerate crime and violence, guarantee this letter wouldn’t have been written. Sadly, this is Seattle, where a hostile takeover of a city block is nicknamed the “Summer of Love” by the city’s mayor.

What this has created is nothing short of state-approved domestic terrorism. This is what this comedy club is trying to avoid. Since it knows these lunatics will continue to haunt and hound the venue to no end, vandalizing and destroying what it can, it’s left to capitulation and knee-bending.

And this is a problem happening in many blue cities.

In today’s America, domestic terrorism is alive and well. Many citizens live in fear of it and even many corporations have decided to pack up and leave blue cities where crime has gotten so out of control that it’s effectively ruled by criminals.

This problem is only going to get worse as criminal elements continue to flow freely into the country. I don’t think I need to emphasize the importance of voting accordingly for leaders that will come stock with a zero-tolerance policy in the coming years.

Cities like Seattle and Portland are just examples of what could happen to any city if it doesn’t begin practicing a heavy crackdown on crime now, but as for cities like these, I’m not sure what can save them except for a complete and total cultural overhaul that focuses on the residents and communities truly becoming intolerant to the criminal element among them.

But hopefully, that will happen soon. These kinds of people don’t stay contained in the cities they start in. They travel and they become everyone else’s problem as they do.

They might be safe in Smurf-blue cities like Seattle, but the moment they step foot into a territory where that level of thuggery isn’t tolerated, politicians and law enforcement need to come down hard. At the very least, they need to be taught they can’t do it outside their “safe” cities.

‘Do states matter?’: Missouri attorney general says this Second Amendment case could boost states’ rights

EXCLUSIVE — Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said Friday that a Biden administration challenge to a gun rights law in his state has the potential to breathe new life into the 10th Amendment rights reserved for state governments and the people.

Fresh out of arguing in defense of a Second Amendment law before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, Bailey spoke with the Washington Examiner about the impact it could have on state sovereignty.

“The Second Amendment Preservation Act is about protecting our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, but it’s also a codification of the anti-commandeering doctrine from the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” he said. “The federal government may not use state law enforcement, or the apparatus of the state, or its political subdivisions to enforce unconstitutional statutes and rules.”

The state law bars Missouri officers from enforcing federal gun laws that are at odds with Missouri statutes, and would impose a $50,000 fine for officers who knowingly do so.

Bailey said that if the issue were to reach the U.S. Supreme Court on the merits and justices provided a favorable ruling, it could increase state authority in a way past courts have not been willing to do and reshape precedent on 10th Amendment jurisprudence. The 10th Amendment reserves for the states powers that the Constitution does not reserve for the federal government.

Bailey called the Missouri gun case the “perfect vehicle” for allowing states to codify the anti-commandeering doctrine.

The Biden administration mounted a challenge to the Missouri law in 2022, claiming the law violated the supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution, which gives the federal government precedent over state authority where conflicting statutes exist.

“Our Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves,” Bailey said, noting that the Constitution was intended to protect the people from the government, and the “Founding Fathers would have understood that states are guarantors of individual liberties.”

“Biden’s Department of Justice rejects that text, history, and tradition of the United States Constitution,” he said.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Brian Wimes, an appointee of Barack Obama, invalidated the Missouri statute on the basis that it violated the supremacy clause, writing that it “exposes citizens to greater harm by interfering with the federal government’s ability to enforce lawfully enacted firearms regulations designed by Congress for the purpose of protecting citizens.”

Bailey requested an emergency review from the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the law, which the high court declined in October, sending the case to the 8th Circuit. At the time, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he would have reinstated the law.

The root issue for Bailey, however, is the authority of states to enact their own laws without the approval of the federal government — and whether the federal government has the power to nullify state laws it simply does not like.

Before the Second Amendment and 10th Amendment issues are resolved on merit, however, the issue of the Department of Justice’s standing to sue — the legal capacity of a party to bring a lawsuit — would need to be decided first.

Bailey is challenging the standing of the department because he says there is no injury that gives it the basis to file a lawsuit. He said the department is simply suing on the basis of potential future conflict between state and federal firearms law — something that would not meet the standing requirement.

Judges James B. Loken, a George H.W. Bush appointee, Steven M. Colloton, a George W. Bush appointee, and Jane L. Kelly, an Obama appointee, presided over the case in a three-judge panel.

Bailey said the judges focused in on the standing issues surrounding the Department of Justice challenge to the state law, as the supremacy clause does not create an independent cause of action to challenge statutes without actual injury. The attorney general said his perception of the judges’ lines of questioning led him to believe they are skeptical of the department’s authority to sue.

It is unclear what the Biden administration would do in the event of an unfavorable ruling, and they would have the opportunity to request it be heard by an en banc panel of the full 8th Circuit, or appeal to the nation’s high court.

If Missouri receives an unfavorable ruling, Bailey said he has the constitutional duty to appeal the case because he said he is required by law to uphold rights protected in the state constitution.

“I have a sacred duty under our state constitution to continue to fight to defend Missourians right to keep and bear arms, and I will happily discharge that duty,” he concluded.