A top gun-rights organization is holding President Donald Trump’s feet to the fire concerning the right to keep and bear arms, insisting his administration live up to their promises about protecting the Second Amendment rights of lawful Americans.
On November 11, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) issued a 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 the Second Amendment.
“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,” the statement said. “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.”
As FPC pointed out in the statement, the Trump Administration’s defense of existing anti-gun laws isn’t limited to just a single topic or issue.
“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 statement said. “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.”
Likewise, the administration has worked to encourage the Supreme Court to avoid answering pivotal questions in the Second Amendment debate.
“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,’” the statement explained. “Yet, when the opportunity arose for the Administration to support exactly such cases—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.”
Ultimately, FPC is calling on the Trump Administration to quickly reverse course and live up to the promises the president made about protecting the Second Amendment.
“The Trump DOJ’s sustained pattern of anti-Second Amendment litigation cannot be dismissed as bureaucratic inertia—it reflects deliberate choices,” the statement concluded. “FPC calls on President Trump to immediately direct his Department of Justice to end its defense of federal gun control laws and to begin using the full power of the executive branch to actively protect and advance the Second Amendment rights of the American people.”
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