Court rulings on firearms and the Second Amendment are becoming increasingly absurd, with activist judges inventing new and novel concepts to uphold restrictions that clearly violate recent Supreme Court precedent.
A decision from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, issued by Judge Mark T. Pittman on September 30, 2025, illustrates this problem. The 14-page ruling in Elite Precision Customs LLC, et al. v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, et al. not only upheld a law infringing on a law-abiding citizen’s ability to acquire a firearm but also introduced a novel justification for its lawfulness.
Equally troubling, the ATF – a subdivision of the Pam Bondi Justice Department – filed a motion to dismiss the case, leaving the law intact, which the judge granted. Simultaneously, Judge Pittman denied the motion for summary judgment filed by Elite Precision.
At issue is a 1968 federal law (18 U.S.C. § 922) that makes it illegal to buy, sell, or transport guns across state lines without a federal license. In practice, this prevents a law-abiding resident of one state from purchasing and taking possession of a firearm in another state without first shipping it to a licensed gun dealer in their home state, adding delays and extra costs.
Elite Precision brought the lawsuit alongside two law-abiding plaintiffs who would have purchased firearms and directly taken possession of them from the Texas-based manufacturer, but were prevented from doing so due to the restrictive law.
Incredibly, Judge Pittman found, “…the Sale Restrictions do not function as a de facto prohibition on possession but rather a reasonable commercial restriction enacted by Congress,” and therefore, “…the Sale Restrictions do not violate the Second Amendment.”
Also problematic are the other anti-Second Amendment circuit court decisions to which this decision cites, including the 2024 decision from the Ninth Circuit in the case of B&L Prods., Inc. v. Newsom, prohibiting the sale of firearms on certain fairgrounds or on any state property, in which the court held that the challenged statutes did not implicate the Second Amendment because they only placed a “minor constraint on the precise locations within a geographic area where one can acquire firearms.”
Firearms Policy Coalition President Brandon Combs issued the following statement on the organization’s website:
This ruling is nothing short of judicial abdication. The court chose to ignore the clear mandate of Bruen and instead applied the very sort of test the Supreme Court rejected three years ago. The right to keep arms inherently includes the right to acquire them, and federal regulations that prohibit peaceable Americans from purchasing handguns across state lines are patently unconstitutional. We reject the fiction that infringing upon a fundamental, enumerated right is merely a ‘modest inconvenience’ that can be deferred to Congress. We will appeal this horrifically flawed decision to the Fifth Circuit.
