I am uneasy after hearing oral arguments in the Supreme Court case, Garland v. VanDerStok, and reviewing a transcript from the October 8, 2024 session. If you’ll recall, Garland v. VanDerStok is a case from the Fifth Circuit challenging a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms regulation relating to the nonsense term “ghost guns.” The plaintiffs in this case challenged the BATF’s authority to redefine what frames and receivers are, or have been.
On June 30, 2023, Federal District Court Judge Reed O’Connor granted summary judgment in the first round of VanDerStok, vacating the BATF’s “frame or receiver” rule and preventing the federal government from enforcing it. In his decision, O’Connor was on point: “This case presents the question of whether the federal government may lawfully regulate partially manufactured firearm components, related firearm products, and other tools and materials in keeping with the Gun Control Act of 1968. Because the Court concludes that the government cannot regulate those items without violating federal law, the Court holds that the government’s recently enacted Final Rule… is unlawful agency action taken in excess of the ATF’s statutory jurisdiction.”
The court case was in response to a 2022 rule in which ATF redefined “firearm” within its regulatory framework to include a much wider range of products that can be converted into a firearm or even just a functional “frame” or “receiver.” ATF made up this definition on its own.
What has me worried is the thorough ignorance of firearms by members of the Supreme Court, but mostly, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. You might ask, what about Sotomayor, Kagan, and Brown Jackson? No, they are too far gone. They will always rule against gun owners and our rights. The remainder, Associate Justices Thomas, Alito, Jr., Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh at least try to understand the basics of firearms operation, though that is no guarantee on how they’ll rule. But the basic math is, the vote could start 4-3 our way, leaving Roberts and Barrett as the margin.
So I looked at the transcript for their questions, and Barrett’s first was about salad.
Justice Barrett to Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar: I just want to follow up on Justice Alito’s question about the omelet. Would your answer change if you ordered [a salad] from HelloFresh and you got a kit, and it was like turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?
To her credit, Justice Barrett asked more insightful questions elsewhere, some of them quite technical. And she also asked whether allowing the BATF to make this change would allow the agency to define AR-15s as machine guns down the road. Solicitor General Prelogar effectively answered, Oh no, we would never do that.
VanDerStok is an important decision if we want to have any chance to rein in ATF. I would have preferred Judge O’Connor’s original decision.
— Todd Woodard
