OSD 347: The government will issue you a list of approved freedoms. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Oct 15, 2025

It was a big week in the courts for gun stuff. As recapped by The Reload:

First, the Department of Justice succeeded in limiting the scope of a Fifth Circuit ruling from January which struck down the ban on handgun sales to adults under age 21. DOJ had asked that pending appeals, the ruling be limited to:

The Fifth Circuit (which covers, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi)
And then outside the Fifth Circuit only the particular plaintiffs in the case — i.e. only “(a) Caleb Reese, Joseph Granich, Emily Naquin, and (b) individuals and federally licensed firearms importers, manufacturers, dealers or collectors who were members of Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Second Amendment Foundation, or Louisiana Shooting Association at the time this action was filed on November 6, 2020”.

“The practical effect of this order is almost laughable if it wasn’t so frustrating and didn’t impact the Second Amendment rights of thousands of individuals,” Adam Kraut, Executive Director of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), said in a statement. “What the court has done here is say that this law is unconstitutional, but in order for an 18-year-old to avoid having their constitutional rights trounced by it today they must live in one of only three states in the nation and have been a member of SAF at age 13.”

(The court also ordered the gun rights groups to turn over membership lists so that plaintiffs could be validated, but the plaintiffs and the DOJ both agreed that that was unreasonable and invasive. The court later rescinded this order.)

Second, the DOJ wrote a brief urging the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal from the Fourth Circuit, which had held the ban on handgun sales to adults under age 21 to be constitutional.

At the Supreme Court, the DOJ submitted an opposition brief on Wednesday to the cert petition filed by gun-rights advocates challenging the Fourth Circuit’s upholding of the same federal law at issue in Reese. In it, the department once again dodged the chance to opine on the merits of the federal law as applied to young adults, but it also encouraged the court not to take up the issue.
“Petitioners renew their contention that Section 922(b)(1) violates the Second Amendment as applied to 18-to-20-year-olds,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in McCoy v. ATF. “But because petitioners have either already turned 21 years old or will do so soon, this case is likely to become moot before the Court has an opportunity to decide it.”

In other words, the Supreme Court should not hear this case because it’s like the ghosts in the Mario games: when you can actually face it, it magically vanishes. Quite the party trick.

For the first example, Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, explained on X that the current administration has taken a hard line against nationwide injunctions for other reasons, and that’s why they didn’t agree to a nationwide injunction in this case. There are good principled arguments the idea of district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions. Those arguments are weaker at the circuit court level, where judge shopping is harder and there’s much less potential for chaos. But the government is against nationwide injunctions even in cases where a circuit court has ruled a law unconstitutional, because they have an unrelated regulatory goal that they feel more strongly about.

For the second example, the government’s opposition motion to the Supreme Court makes good arguments about why other cases on this same topic are procedurally more tidy. But the Supreme Court is aware of that, and they can reach their own conclusion on the subject. The DOJ chose to weigh in against this case.

The general mindset here is not that people have natural rights whose protection is the government’s entire reason for existing. Instead it’s that sometimes the government will grant people rights, and that if those grants make it harder for the government to pursue its goals, then, well, be patient. The check is in the mail, it’ll arrive in a few years. And why are you so obsessed with your rights anyway? You don’t think they’re more important than the government’s current goals, do you? What an odd thought, a government subordinate to the individual.

As ever, a good reminder that we’re lucky that tech and culture are upstream of law, and that in the long run they dominate whatever the courts do or don’t do.

This week’s links

Amazon bought the James Bond series and airbrushed Bond’s gun out of all of the posters

After backlash, they replaced the airbrushed photos with ones that didn’t have guns in them in the first place. Behind the scenes, what probably happened here is partly Amazon’s own policy and partly them trying to advertise the series on the major online ad platforms, all of which (often inadvertently) frequently take down ads depicting firearms. So the rationally self-interested move is to not depict guns in your ads. (Plug: we invested earlier this year in Armanet, a gun-friendly ad platform.)