Last week a Federal Judge dismissed the claims of two bump stock retailers who sued the government after they were forced to destroy their inventory.
The two companies, as well as two individuals, were made to destroy or surrender a total of 74,995 bump stocks after the ban took effect in March.
The plaintiffs argued that when the government ordered the bump stocks destroyed without compensation, they were violating the Takings Clause of the Fifth amendment.
This clause states that private property can’t be taken for public use without compensation.
Of course, the argument was that bump stocks should be banned for ‘public safety’ and thus these people lost several hundred thousands of dollars to the public good.
But the Federal Judge in the case, Senior Circuit Judge Loren Smith disagreed.
He said, “The law is different in this case because the government, as the sovereign, has the power to take property that is dangerous, diseased, or used in criminal activities without compensation.”
Clearly the diseased or ‘used in criminal activities’ don’t apply, so Judge Smith has established a legal precedent that if you own something that the Federal Government decides is dangerous, they can take it without compensation.
Let’s expand that.
Baseball bats are dangerous. Knives. Cars. Hammers.
All dangerous, and in total, responsible for many times more dangerous than guns.
Are they going to come confiscate all the cars without compensation, because they’re dangerous?
No, of course not. The shoddy logical employed here falls apart in seconds.
Smith continued, trying to justify the tyrannical theft of half a million dollars in private property.
He said it would be different “if the government confiscated a gun legally possessed by a person not committing a crime,” but argued that “machine guns,” which was how bump stocks were reclassified, are not protected by the Second Amendment.
Is That How They Want to Play the Game?
Of course, this is a game of slippery and deceptive semantics.
When the bump stocks were manufactured and purchased, they were not illegal.
Retroactively calling a piece of plastic a machine gun (and thus making them illegal) might cloak your actions in the shroud of respectability for now.
But let’s do this to cars.
Millions of cars are purchased legally, licensed and registered legally, etc.
One day, the Federal Govt decides to say that all cars are death machines and dangerous and passes a new law that makes it illegal to own a car.
Now the Federal Government has the right to confiscate billions of dollars in cars because Americans aren’t legally allowed to own them anymore, so we’re all engaged in criminal activity and thus aren’t eligible for compensation.
They literally think we’re that dumb.
Either they think we’re stupid enough to fall for arguments this pathetic, or they think we’re just going to sit back and be trampled forever. Time for gun owners to flex their political muscles.
The cowardly politicians who think they’re running the show need to hear from gun owners that we’re not taking this anymore.