As many of you know, next week is the start of the Supreme Court’s fall term. On Tuesday, the Court will hear oral argument in Garland v. VanDerStok, a challenge to the recent “frame or receiver” rules that the ATF issued in an effort to ban “ghost guns” and “80% receiver” kits. Audio of the VanDerStok argument (which begins at 10:00 AM Eastern) can be streamed live, or can be downloaded shortly after the argument is complete.
Like my post-Bruen SCOTUS oral argument wrap-up, after the VanDerStok argument I will be moderating a panel discussion about it with three distinguished experts on firearms and Second Amendment law. If you listen to the oral argument and have questions for the panel about it, please post them in the comment section under this post before 6 PM Eastern on Tuesday.
Joining me will be:
Stephen Halbrook
Stephen is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and is a preeminent Second Amendment scholar and lawyer. Besides producing a huge number of scholarly and popular works on Second Amendment law over the past four decades, he has also personally argued (and won) three firearms cases at the Supreme Court, and thus can provide unique insight on SCOTUS oral argument.
Stephen has also written extensively on VanDerStok at the Volokh Conspiracy lawblog. If you really want to understand the case before the oral argument, I highly recommend reading his posts there explaining the issues.
Chuck Michel
Chuck is a California attorney at Michel & Associates, P.C. and President of the California Rifle & Pistol Association. For decades, he has been in the vanguard of many high profile Second Amendment cases, including Duncan v. Bonta (challenging California’s magazine capacity limit) and Boland v. Bonta (challenging California microstamping law). He has also written extensively on firearms and Second Amendment law.
Joseph Greenlee
Formerly the Senior Attorney and Director of Constitutional Studies at the Firearms Policy Coalition, Joseph is now the Director of the Office of Litigation Counsel at the NRA-ILA, supervising the ILA’s litigation efforts. Besides authoring numerous scholarly papers on Second Amendment law, for many years he has been in the trenches in numerous Second Amendment test cases.
We’ll record the panel discussion Tuesday evening and the video will be posted here on SNW shortly thereafter.
LKB, any idea if the issue of frame serialization requirements will be brought up?
To me, that is, as the late Frank Zappa once said, ‘The ‘Crux of the Biscuit’ of gun control.
A government, *purposefully* UNABLE to link a firearm to an individual citizen, is far less likely to put their boot of oppression on that citizen’s throat to oppress them if they can’t make that tangible link.
Needless to say, firearm component micro-stamping requirements and ammo propellant taggerents fall under the same umbrella…