As of Tuesday morning, firearm owners across the country are still awaiting a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Moody in the Eastern District of Arkansas on whether he will impose a preliminary injunction against implementation of the ATF’s new rule on the definition of “Engaged in the business” of firearm sales. The rule went into effect Monday, though it has been temporarily blocked in a limited way as a result of a temporary restraining order by a federal judge in Texas in a related lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach on Friday argued at a hearing in Little Rock that the injunction in the Kansas-led case should be granted while the case itself is litigated. The Kansas State Rifle Association agrees with Kobach that the ATF’s new rule flies in the face of the Second Amendment, and would cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs (21 states, 3 individual Kansans, and one of the KSRA’s affiliated clubs) by placing private gun owners in legal danger if they don’t conduct background checks before selling a privately owned firearm.
AG Kobach also argued to the court that the rule is a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, saying that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority in implementing the rule. The ATF in creating its rule, chose to omit the word “livelihood” from the final rule, thereby defining a gun dealer in a significantly broader way than Congress has ever done.
At least one gun-confiscation organization has estimated that private firearm sales account for about 22% of the approximately 16 million firearms sold each year across America. Those are their numbers, not ours.
There is absolutely no way the drafters of our Second Amendment did so with the intention that a single unelected federal bureaucracy would ever have the power to unilaterally ban the sale of over 3.5 million firearms a year between individuals — let alone that they could do so in direct violation of clear Congressional direction.
More reading on the background of the case and the ATF rule:
Read more on our News page
Watch our interview with Attorney General Kris Kobach
Read more about the Texas-led companion case in The Texan
Read more about the Kansas-led case from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (paywall)
