“If the ATF can ban bump stocks, any [extra constitutional] agency can ban anything.”
May a federal agency rewrite a federal statute? May that rewrite turn otherwise innocent Americans into criminals overnight? Not if Michael Cargill can help it!
Under our Constitution, the answers to those questions should be an obvious no. Congress—and Congress, alone—has the power to make law. The executive branch, which includes federal agencies and departments, possesses only the power to enforce it. But if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gets its way, it will possess the power to make law and enforce it.
A federal statute outlaws machine guns but it does not outlaw bump stock devices that attach to a rifle and allow it to fire many shots in succession. For years, the ATF correctly concluded that bump stocks are not illegal machine guns under federal law.
All that changed in 2019, when the ATF switched course and decided that bump stocks are now “machine guns” banned under federal law. That switch threatened to turn more than 500,000 people into criminals overnight and may face a 10-year prison sentence for owning something the government had told them before was legal to possess when they bought it.
Michael Cargill is one of those people. A gun shop owner, Army veteran and firearms instructor in Austin, Texas, Cargill bought two bump stocks in April 2018. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Mr. Cargill bought his bump stocks in reliance on the ATF’s conclusion that the devices were entirely legal to own and use. In fact, a letter attached to the device said so.
NCLA represents Mr. Cargill in a constitutional lawsuit that challenges the ATF’s effort to rewrite a federal statute. The principle NCLA and Mr. Cargill seek to vindicate is simple: If bump stocks are to be banned, Congress must make that decision and Congress must exercise the authority to ban them. If an agency such as the ATF can rewrite a statute as it pleases, then any agency can rewrite any statute as it pleases. Whatever one thinks of bump stocks, our laws must comply with the Constitution, or neither the Constitution nor the rule of law has any meaning.
