On Friday, September 3, 2021, Tennessee Firearms Association joined
Gun Owners of America and other conservative 2nd Amendment advocacy
groups in submitting an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court
in the case of
.
(No. 21-159). This case was initially filed in Utah as one of several
federally filed challenges to the ATF’s attempt to expand and materially
alter the legislative definition of a machinegun to include other
devices which the ATF has historically stated did not meet the
definition of a machinegun.
The federal district court had denied the petitioner’s request for an
injunction and in so doing it ruled that the ATF’s new reinterpretation
of the original 1934 law, which reinterpretation was more than 80 years
after the law’s initial passage and which was contrary to several years
of contrary interpretations, was the best reading of the statute. When
the district court denied the initial injunction, the case was appealed
by permission to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. On appeal, the 10th
Circuit deferred under the
Chevron deference doctrine, a rule
created by the Supreme Court to allow federal courts to defer to agency
interpretations of federal statutes, to hold that the district court’s
decision not to grant an injunction prohibiting the bumpstock ban from
going into effect was appropriate.
TFA has joined with GOA and
other organizations in filing an amicus brief with the United States
Supreme Court in which the parties are asserting that “the court below
failed to fulfill its responsibility to “say what the law is” in the
face of an agency-made regulation which contradicts both the statutory
language and the agency’s prior interpretations made by apolitical
experts. Instead, the court improvidently deferred to a wholesale
re-writing of the meaning of the term “machinegun” under § 5845(b),
which was a direct result of a president’s political agenda after a
national tragedy, and not an act of an agency’s subject matter expertise
pursuant to a technical analysis.” Brief at p. 6
If you are a
member of the Tennessee Firearms Association and would like to
contribute to the legal expenses incurred in filing these briefs with
the courts, please take action by
donating to the effort to help as we increasingly fight for our rights not only in the State legislature but also in the federal courts.