On October 10, the Department of Justice and plaintiffs in Reese v. ATF filed a joint motion to amend the judgment of a Louisiana District Court earlier this week, which compelled gun rights groups to turn over their membership lists by October 28.
Gun rights groups came out aggressively against the District Court judgment, and there was some confusion in the community about the Department of Justice’s position on this ruling.
(In our earlier reporting, we overlooked and omitted this statement by the DOJ in their initial response brief:
“To be sure, the organizational members may have a First Amendment right to decline to disclose the identity of their members to Defendants”)
The recently-filed joint motion clarifies the DOJ position stating “The Government, as a general policy, does not compel disclosure of the identity of members of private organizations, and the Government did not seek to do so here.”
Parties requested the following amendment to the judgment to satisfy the controversy around the membership list request:
And to alter the language of paragraph 5 to replace “shall provide” with “may provide.”
Gun rights groups have already declared they would never share their private membership lists under any circumstances.
Both parties are requesting a response to the motion from the Court by October 14, 2025.
Additional Background
Our initial reporting on this case missed some of the subtleties and peculiarities of the legal system, which have been clarified by Mark Smith of Four Boxes Diner in a recent YouTube video.
The DOJ is battling “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions in courts across the U.S. — specifically overreaching orders where one judge in a liberal hotspot blocks a Trump policy everywhere in America, even for people not involved in the case.
Smith speculates that in their recommendation in Reese, the DOJ applied this logic to limit the wins’ benefits to only the named individual plaintiffs to avoid setting a precedent that could be used against them in anti-Trump cases elsewhere. The judge then interpreted this request in a very narrow and restrictive way.
This could imply that the DOJ motion was not as nefarious or anti-Second Amendment as our headline inferred, and that the DOJ is maneuvering in a challenging legal environment. Smith still maintains that overall, the case is a win.
