U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- President Trump once said to a packed room of NRA members, “the war of the Second Amendment is over”.
With Trump’s bump stock ban set to go into effect, the end of hostility towards the Second Amendment doesn’t seem to be at an end. In fact, this new interpretation of the National Firearms Act goes beyond anything that Obama could have hoped to accomplish in his attacks on the Second Amendment.
A lot of gun owners feel betrayed by the Trump administration.
Gun owners were some of Presidents Trump’s most stalwart supporters during his presidential campaign. We think that banning something because a murderer used it in a crime doesn’t make us safer, but just turns law-abiding citizens into criminals.
A group of Second Amendment supporters has started a petition on the White House website hoping to convince the President that the bump stock ban is wrong and that he needs to reverse the problematic reinterpretation of the law.
Any petition that is submitted to the President from the whitehouse.gov website and receives more than 100,000 signatures within 30 days must get an official response from the White House within 60 days.
At the heart of the problem with the new ban is that it changes the current interpretation of the law without going through the proper steps of going through Congress. It accomplishes this feat by changing what is considered a machine gun. It is basically skipping Congress to make new laws.
This precedent is not only dangerous because of the dangers of a future president changing laws in the same way but activtist also point out that it could potentially violate the Constitution by violating the separation of powers since this is basically a new law.
Gun Owners of America is planning to sue over the new regulation on the grounds that the Department of Justice doesn’t have the authority to write new laws.
“As written, this case has important implications for gun owners since, in the coming days, an estimated half a million bump stock owners will have the difficult decision of either destroying or surrendering their valuable property — or else risk felony prosecution,” Gun Owners of America Executive Director Erich Pratt said in a statement. “ATF’s claim that it can rewrite Congressional law cannot pass legal muster. Agencies are not free to rewrite laws under the guise of ‘interpretation’ of a statute, especially where the law’s meaning is clear.”
The writer of the petition worries that the government will be able to use this new-found power to rewrite any gun law in the future to outlaw other gun parts, or even certain guns themselves. They see this move by the Department of Justice and the ATF as an attack on the Second Amendment itself.
The creator is asking President Trump to overturn the new interpretation of the law and restore the Second Amendment.
At the time of this writing, the petition has 302 of the 100,000 signatures needed. The petition has until January 20th, 2019 to get the required number of signatures.
Readers can find and sign the petition on the White House website located at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reverse-bump-stock-ban-against-firearm-parts
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%’ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on leftist deplatforming methods and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on Facebook at realjohncrump, or at www.crumpy.com.