Washington, D.C. – Gun Owners of America (GOA) received support from 22 State Attorneys General today with an amicus brief in favor of GOA’s Supreme Court petition challenging the reclassification of a bump stock as a machine gun.
Last month on March 4th, GOA filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court challenging the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ (ATF) 2018 reclassification of bump stocks as “machine guns.” GOA’s petition argues that the ATF circumvented Congress in their attempt to create new federal law. Its overly broad definition of “machinegun” could be used to ban other legal firearms.
Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, commented, “When you give the government a step, it takes a mile. With nearly half of our country’s top law enforcers supporting us on our petition to the Supreme Court on bump stocks, it shows that Americans want the government to stop trampling on our right to keep and bear arms. Anti-gun bureaucrats have no business chipping away at the Second Amendment, and we at GOA will continue to challenge anyone who tries.”
The Attorneys General from the following states have signed as petitioners on GOA’s behalf: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
GOA is also thankful for the other amici who joined the brief, including the New Civil Liberties Alliance, as well as David Codrea, Scott Heuman, and Owen Monroe at the time of release.
Nearly half, so not a majority. What percentage of the American population are represented by these 22 attourneys general? Maybe a quarter?
The simple fact is the only reason these ridiculous bump stocks exist is to simulate full auto fire, either to dump ammo a little too quickly (and that ammo isn’t getting any cheaper) or to slaughter a whole concert full of people. Honestly, in a day where forced reset triggers are considered machine guns, bump stocks should be too! Don’t undo the one good thing Trump did!
A piece of plastic cannot be a machine gun by any reasonable definition. Majority rule doesn’t make right. If 6 of your 10 closest friends turn cannibal, does that make it right? Suppose the next republican president decides to ban pronouns because a “majority” of Americans think that they are stupid, unnecessary, dangerous? What then? No one will help you, because you let them take away the fake machine guns, and the government has real ones. More laws certainly do not make for a very free society; do more laws really make us safer than we’d be if easy mag dumps are legal? Is it worth it?