Tenth Amendment Center – by TJ Martinell
Just as some gun rights groups flip-flop on protecting the right to keep and bear arms from federal encroachment, so has Republican President Donald Trump. Not only has he ramped up federal gun control enforcement, but he has unilaterally implemented new federal gun control in the form of a bump stock ban.
As we’ve pointed before, the effectiveness of this policy is moot: the feds have no constitutional authority to restrict firearms.
It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t merely something occurring under Trump’s watch but out of his control. The president actively pursued an unconstitutional firearm restriction through an unconstitutional method via agency rulemaking. If the constitution did not delegate authority to the Congress or the president to enact such a rule – and the Second Amendment makes that adamantly clear – then obviously a bureaucracy has no such power, either.
Before Trump supporters turn a blind eye to this or rationalize his actions, they should honestly ask themselves how they would respond if Obama tried to do the same thing.
Oh, wait. He essentially did.
In 2015, President Obama directed the ATF to pursue a possible ban on the M855 cartridge. To do so, they released a proposed agency rule which redefined M855 “green tip” ammunition as “armor piercing” to qualify it for federal prohibition under the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA).
Ostensibly, the rule was meant to curb police deaths, but many gun rights advocates rightly pointed out that it was likely a thinly-veiled effort to undermine civilian access to AR-15s. The National Rifle Association reports that the “ban was opposed by law enforcement experts, 238members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 53 U.S. senators, 80,000 Americans who submitted comments to ATF, and the NRA.”
Thankfully, though, the M855 cartridge ban ultimately failed.
When Obama was doing it, unilaterally changing agency rules to ban a certain kind of ammunition was seen as “back-door gun control.” It was an egregious executive overreach. It was a foot in the door that would lead to more and more federal gun control.
People who said this were right.
Now, the Trump administration is using essentially the same process to ban bump stocks, using redefinition of terms and changing agency rules to make the President’s preferred gun control effort fit within current federal law on the books.
In the end, NRA-backed Trump succeeded in a way Obama could not: adding another major violation of our right to keep and bear arms onto the books that is unlikely to ever be repealed.
If you ever needed an example of why we can’t trust anyone in D.C. to protect our gun rights, this is it.
The only way forward is for states to pass anti-commandeering laws that withhold critical state resources and personnel from the feds.
TJ Martinell is an author, writer, and award-winning reporter from Washington state. His dystopian novel The Stringers depicting a neo-Prohibition Era in the city of Seattle is available on Amazon.
Visit his personal site at www.tjmartinell.com. Join his Facebook page here. Listen to his weekly podcast on Sound Cloud.
1st off there is no such thing as Fkn “Gun Rights” or any such thing as the Governments ability to regulate such things in our America….
Our Rights are absolute….they have been “Enumerated” against the Constitution, in order to state an ensemble of what we claim our rights are, and they are purposely not all inclusive of all other rights, as we are a “Free” people….
Any discussions about government having one ability or another to define or dictate at any level what our rights are or are not, is just preposterous and criminal. There really is nothing else to say on the matter.
These people are purely sick and drunk on power and authority and it WILL end badly for them and probably us too, but better we parish in the process of eliminating these scum from our midst than to live under what their version of freedom is for us….fk um all….
Oh, Merry Christmas….