NASGW filed an amicus brief supporting the challenge to the ATF "Frame or Receiver" Final Rule that will be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in October.
Read the Complete Amicus Brief
Simple logic dictates that if A can be “converted” into B, then A is not B. Hence the need for conversion. And what is true generally is equally true of frames and receivers under the plain text of the Gun Control Act (“GCA”). In fact, ATF said so itself for decades, across administrations of different parties. But it has belatedly done an about-face. According to ATF’s new rule, a “partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver,” “including a frame or receiver parts kit, that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function as a frame or receiver,” 27 C.F.R. §478.12(c), is already a “frame or receiver.” That novel position brings much into ATF’s regulatory domain that has long been outside it, and does so with criminal consequences to boot. Such an expansion of federal power in an area implicating fundamental constitutional rights is a job for Congress treading carefully, not an agency asserting powers long disclaimed. But ATF’s rule defies, rather than follows, the statutory text adopted by Congress and basic logic to boot.
Regulating items that can be readily transformed into something else is hardly beyond Congress’ ken. Congress knows how to do it, and did not do it here. In the firearms context in particular, Congress has made clear beyond cavil that some items capable of conversion do count as “firearms” under the GCA and related laws. But Congress did so by using very explicit language that is conspicuously absent from the “frame or receiver” provision. Congress’ decision to use those words elsewhere but not here must be respected. ATF’s effort to rewrite a decades-old statute—and, in the process, not only unsettle decades-long expectations, but displace various states’ approaches to the issues—eviscerates the separation of powers and tramples over the liberties that our Constitution secures. That ATF has done so in the context of a criminal statute governing constitutionally protected conduct makes its effort that much more beyond the pale, as that is the absolute last context in which an agency should have leeway to stretch the text. Accordingly, even if there were any statutory ambiguity here—and there is not—the rule of lenity and the canon of constitutional avoidance would both militate against blessing ATF’s late-breaking maximalist reading of the statute.
Nor can ATF salvage its rule with a thinly veiled resort to purpose couched in the presumption against ineffectiveness. Cargill makes clear that public-safety and law-enforcement concerns, however valid, cannot trump statutory text. When new public-policy issues arise, it is for Congress, not administrative agencies, to decide whether and how statutes should be modified to address them—as Congress has not hesitated to recognize when it comes to the GCA. It is troubling enough when any agency repeatedly fails to appreciate that core constraint on its powers. That this pattern of overreach is coming from an agency empowered to regulate constitutionally protected conduct makes it all the more essential for this Court to once again confine ATF to its statutorily prescribed role.