DD in DC
October 11, 2024
I return from our nation’s whited sepulcher to say that yes, the reports about the arguments in VanDerStok are true! If this case is just to be decided by what we heard at the arguments, or what we can read in this transcript, kit guns by mail are over. And that’s not just because Elizabeth Prelogar is a star. This is not the report I’d hoped to give.
But the Supreme Court is sometimes a law court, so we can hope they make a decision on the law instead of public policy. Cargill thought he lost his arguments as well, and that case had a surprising decision. Even in the worst case, the trip was worth making. As plaintiffs, we were given the right to sleep outside for hours to hear our case.
All through the night we were visited by Dick Heller himself, who arrived by bicycle to deliver medicine and stories about the Cato Institute, his many victories, and his illegal, yet registered, AR-15.
The 3D gun community’s popular subculture of stable geniuses would like to blame a potential negative decision on FPC’s involvement and Cooper & Kirk’s strategy, but this is just more of the perverse disavowal I’ve elsewhere identified as central to the “Fudd Buster Idea.” If these people had anything useful with which to inform the Court’s understanding, they could have scratched together some money and filed an amicus brief. But they didn’t because they don’t.
We can still examine their disavowal in action, however. Attorney Patterson actually delivered a favorite of the 3D gun arguments before the Court. He argued strenuously and repeatedly that the ATF’s “readily convertible” language would also make every AR-15 a machine gun. Checkmate, right?
Unfortunately, this visibly annoyed most of the justices, who would no longer have it after about the third time he’d made the point. General Prelogar reminded the Court it “didn’t have to bind itself to the practical ramifications of the rule.”
The biggest single miss our side made was being unable to persuasively answer Justice Roberts’ question about the people interested in unfinished frames and receivers and, by implication, why. So here goes:
The AR-15 80 percent receiver was created by ATF determination letter in the late 70s. It was produced in reply to a request by an OEM manufacturer who wanted to know where to draw the line for his unregulated subcontractors. The bulk of unfinished frames and receivers were created as a result of decades of ATF accommodation of the political economy of modern capitalism, which includes working with international, unregulated subcontractors. The products are not the result of the insane and illicit designs of a criminal network of gun traffickers.
We the public simply adopted unfinished receivers because they were already legal. Plymouth Rock landed on us.
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