A staggering 26 states filed suit against the federal agency charging that its new Final Rule greatly overstepped its authority by creating new law outside of the legislative process. Private weapons transactions between law-abiding citizens would now require a background check, and the person selling the firearm would magically become a “firearms dealer.”
Selling a gun for profit would mandate registration as a licensed dealer. This is a giant step closer to the gun control lobby’s goal of universal background checks, and its proponents know that well.
Texas and Kansas spearheaded two large coalitions of states suing the ATF, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and their leaders.
Leading the charge from the Lone Star State is Attorney General Ken Paxton. Posting on X, formerly Twitter, he announced that the suit targets the new “ATF regulation that would subject hundreds of thousands of law-abiding gun owners to presumptions of criminal guilt of engaging in the constitutionally protected private sale of firearms.”
The Texas AG called it a “great honor” to defend the state against a “tyrannical abuse of authority.”
Paxton added at the press conference at the Frisco Gun Club, “Come and take it.”
This battle refrain dates to ancient Sparta and later became a rallying cry in the charge for Texas’ independence from Mexico.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach also issued the challenge to Washington bureaucrats. He declared that the change is the government’s “latest attempt to strip away the Second Amendment rights of Americans through ATF regulations which make many law-abiding gun owners felons if they sell a firearm or two to family or friends.”
Kobach deemed the rule “blatantly unconstitutional” and said the sweeping effort by over half of U.S. states is to protect fundamental rights for all Americans.
Meanwhile, Florida officials enacted their own separate lawsuit against the ATF and DOJ.
Attorney General Ashley Moody called the new rule a “federal overreach that would force thousands of law-abiding gun owners to register as federal firearms dealers and navigate a federal bureaucracy.”
It was the longstanding policy of the ATF to distinguish between federally licensed firearms dealers and those who merely conduct random transactions as private individuals. An individual only needed a federal license for these activities if they were involved in “a course of trade or business” that featured “repetitive” purchasing and selling of weapons with the “principal objective” of “livelihood and profit.”
But 2022’s so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) included subtle changes that opened the door for the new agency regulations.
It removed the “livelihood” stipulation, meaning that gaining a profit alone would elevate the private individual to the status of needing a federal firearms license.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) warned at the time of BSCA’s passage that it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The gun rights organization noted that the new law “leaves too much discretion in the hands of government officials and also contains undefined and overbroad provisions — inviting interference with our constitutional freedoms.”
This left the door open for notably anti-gun federal officials to twist and reinterpret regulations that were in place for decades.
What is blatantly obvious though unspoken is the goal of many in the anti-gun lobby to completely ban private gun transactions. They seek a paper trail for every weapon and intimate knowledge of the possessions of individuals.
This is another building block to the goal of a national gun registry. And that is a slippery slope no defender of Second Amendment freedoms wants to go down.
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