SAN ANGELO, Texas — On October 12, the Department of Justice responded to a motion by the state plaintiffs in the Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF case seeking to clarify the permanent injunction. The DOJ’s response brief, issued by the Civil Division, seeks to maintain the narrow scope of the current injunction, illustrating a tension between gun owners’ desired permanent relief and the ATF’s current non-enforcement policy.
In layman’s terms, the 15 state plaintiffs want the court to specifically clarify two things: whether the ATF must provide guidance to FFLs, and – more significantly – whether the “injunction prohibits defendants from enforcing the challenged NFA provisions as to any person or transaction within the states’ borders.”
The DOJ’s position is that because the ATF issued detailed guidance on October 9 via an open letter, no further clarification is needed.
With regard to the geographical enforcement issue, the DOJ states that, “because ATF is not enforcing the challenged NFA provisions in any state, clarifying whether the Court’s injunction entirely prohibits enforcement in a particular group of states would have no real world impact. There’s thus no present need for the Court to provide this clarification.”
Yet the gun rights community wholeheartedly disagrees. Administrative non-enforcement policies do not carry the weight of legal holdings. The move is further puzzling because the request to limit the injunction doesn’t align with the DOJ’s general posture on Second Amendment rights, as directed by President Trump in his February 2025 executive order.
Jared Yanis, Second Amendment advocate and host of the Guns and Gadgets YouTube channel, put it this way:
But legal protection based on a permanent court order is not the same thing as reliance on an agency’s current exercise of discretion. Because discretion can change 3 minutes from now. And here’s the constitutional question. If the federal government accepts that these particular NFA restrictions can no longer be enforced consistently with the court’s ruling, then why should Americans have to depend on the continued goodwill of federal officials?
Illustrating the tenuousness of the non-enforcement policy, the DOJ itself states that, “the Court’s injunction cannot be fairly read to bar enforcement of the challenged NFA provisions against all persons and transactions within the plaintiff states.” That is to say, enforcement could still take place against anyone within the plaintiff states who is not a party to the case.
And the DOJ also notes that there is disagreement over the understanding of the injunction by the states themselves. As proof, it points to a separate lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Missouri which seeks an injunction against enforcement of the same regulations.
Although the DOJ’s response is procedural as it relates to the separate lawsuit, the fact remains that no victory for gun owners can be cemented by policy alone. Further clarification from the court would be helpful, not harmful, and the DOJ’s overall posture in this filing is not in the spirit of securing Second Amendment rights, but accomplishing a procedural “gotcha.”
