Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) today issued the following statement condemning the Trump Administration’s ongoing defense of federal gun control laws and calling on President Trump to take immediate action to restore the integrity of his pledge to protect Second Amendment rights:
Since President Donald J. Trump signed the “Protecting Second Amendment Rights” executive order in February, his Department of Justice has done exactly the opposite—relentlessly defending the federal government’s unconstitutional gun control regime. Instead of using the Justice Department’s vast power to secure Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, the Trump DOJ has used it to fight against the People—even taking extreme positions in court to resist injunctions that block the government’s enforcement of gun laws that federal judges have already found unconstitutional.
Last month, the Administration’s Solicitor General, D. John Sauer—the government’s top appellate lawyer, often called the “10th Justice” for his influence with the Supreme Court—urged the Court to deny review in a case challenging the National Firearms Act’s (NFA) registration and taxation scheme for short-barreled rifles. The Administration argued that the NFA’s intrusive requirements are “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” effectively endorsing the very federal overreach the Second Amendment was written to prevent.
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In an effort to convince the Court to dodge the question of unconstitutional federal restrictions, the Trump DOJ suggested that the Court should focus on “laws banning AR-15 rifles.” Yet, when the opportunity arose for the Administration to support exactly such a case—a challenge to an AR-15 rifle ban out of Illinois—the Trump DOJ was silent.
Rather than support good Supreme Court vehicles, the Trump DOJ has chosen to game the system and throw its weight behind bad cases likely to strengthen the government’s power and weaken individual liberty, such as United States v. Hemani, which the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear.
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The Trump DOJ’s continuing adversarial posture to the Second Amendment doesn’t end there. In United States v. George Peterson—an FPC-supported Fifth Circuit criminal appeal that challenges the NFA’s unconstitutional registration and taxation of firearm suppressors—the Trump DOJ opposed a petition for rehearing en banc, doubling down on its defense of oppressive federal gun laws.
