Joe Biden has been pushing his agenda through by any means necessary. But the courts just slammed the brakes on his destruction of the rule of law.
And a federal judge hit Joe Biden with a major loss that has huge consequences.
One of Biden’s pet political projects is the disarming of the American public.
There’s only one issue, Congress is split and there’s absolutely no way a gun control bill would survive through the legislature.
Rather than try to reach across the aisle or leave Americans to their rights, Biden directed his bureaucrats at the ATF to issue a regulation that may as well be law.
But he has to be slicker than that if he thinks he’s going to pull the wool over the judiciary’s eyes.
In response to a complaint filed by gun rights groups, a federal judge in Texas temporarily suspended President Biden’s new limits on handguns with stabilizing braces.
Judge Drew B. Tipton of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) a preliminary injunction on Wednesday, barring the agency from enforcing its new stabilizing-brace rule.
The order was issued on the eve of the rule’s implementation in response to a lawsuit filed by Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Gun Owners Foundation, and the State of Texas.
Tipton’s action comes after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals prohibited ATF from enforcing the regulation against plaintiffs including clients of Maxim Defense Industries, a pistol stabilizing-brace maker, and the Firearms Policy Coalition in a related case.
That decision came only days before a deadline for people to register their pistol braces with ATF, destroy them, or remove them from their weapons. Those who do not comply with the requirement by May 31 will be fined and might face up to ten years in prison or $10,000 in fines, or both, according to the ATF.
The key distinction between the two cases is that this one involves a non-private organization, the State of Texas.
Former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a preliminary injunction motion against ATF earlier this month, claiming that the pistol-brace rule will impose compliance costs on Texas police officers who own previously legal handguns with stabilizing braces and must now expend resources to register those weapons.
Tipton agreed and found that Texas established standing to sue ATF and “has sufficiently shown that it will suffer irreparable harm absent a preliminary injunction enjoining the enforcement of the Final Rule.”
The stabilizing brace rule was enacted as part of Biden’s comprehensive gun violence policy, which he revealed in April 2021 in reaction to the murder at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, in which a gunman used a pistol with a stabilizing brace to kill ten people.
Another mass killer utilized a stabilizing brace in a shooting that killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019.
ATF defines stabilizing braces as an accessory “that provides a surface area that allows the weapon to be fired from the shoulder, so long as other factors that indicate that the firearm is designed, made, and intended to be fired from the shoulder.”
The ATF’s rule, which was finalized on January 13, classifies handguns with connected stabilizing braces as short-barreled rifles, which are severely controlled by Congress due to their accuracy and concealability, making them hazardous in the wrong hands.
Biden has accused the gun business of seeking to skirt federal rules by selling stabilizing braces that, according to him and his administration, may “essentially convert a pistol into a short-barreled rifle.”
According to the ATF, at least three million weapons with stabilizing braces are in use in the United States. According to Congressional Research Service estimates, there are currently between 10 million and 40 million stabilizing braces in use.
Gun rights advocates have contended in court that the stabilizing brace rule violates the Constitution by requiring millions of gun owners to register their guns or face felony charges.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
