I don't think this is as breathlessly bad as Fox's headline makes it out to be.
It's going to end up in court as another process is the punishment.
EO's are powerful, but they cannot change the letter of the law, and the courts have been consistent about that.
The inventory of an FFL becomes the property of the holder as a non-licensee and it becomes no different, legally, from any other large collection being sold.
Changing the definition of "in the business of" to mean "selling anything at all" is almost definitely going to result in a ruling of being constitutionally vague once the punishing process is finished.
I think, thanks to Bruen, we're tantalizingly close to being able to say that the entire '68 act is unconstitutional in a way that sticks. The EO overreach cases with bumpstocks will further cement that if the government wants something to be illegal, it's going to have to go through congress; and not legislated from the executive branch.
Nobody is more surprised than me that I have become an optimist.
I share that outlook.
ReplyDeleteSCOTUS and the circuits have been trimming back the overgrowth on the 2A hedge since Heller, and daylight is about to break over it for the first time since the 1930s.
Every state legislature action going back decades and any federal EO is about to be declared moot prima facie before they even finish getting the changes to the printers, and even Congress is going to have to try to make any changes solely by constitutional amendment, which effectively ends all the legislative and executive nonsense.
It won't stop them from trying, but it stops them from winning.
If they keep pushing, they're going to activate rooftop balloting in earnest.
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