Is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives overstepping its bounds in banning bump stocks? Is the agency wrongly defining lower receivers for AR-15’s as “firearms,” and if so, what does it mean for hundreds if not thousands of cases decided over the past 50 years?
These are some pretty big questions, and we try to tackle them on today’s Cam & Co. with the help of Caleb Kruckenberg of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing Utah resident Clark Aposhian in his bid to overturn an ATF rule retroactively banning bump stocks after the agency had, for several years, determined that the items were lawful.
Image by PBS
Kruckenberg says the lawsuit isn’t about whether or not bump stocks are protected under the Constitution, but about whether the agency had the authority to do what it did, or whether it was up to Congress to ban bump stocks through legislation. As the New Civil Liberties Alliance put it last June, when it filed an appeal with the 10th Circuit.