Gun Rights Group Blasts Bondi for ‘Ultimate Betrayal’ of 2nd Am. for Making Argument That Could Ban ‘EVERY HANDGUN IN AMERICA’

AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File

Gun Owners of America lambasted Attorney General Pam Bondi on its social media accounts for legal arguments her office made in a recent pleading, accusing the Trump administration of the “ultimate betrayal” of the Second Amendment.

GOA, a gun rights organization founded in 1976, calls itself the “no compromise gun lobby” and has sparred with the National Rifle Association, accusing the larger and older group of not taking as strong of a stance on gun rights.

At issue is a lawsuit filed by the Silencer Shop Foundation (SSF), GOA, and several other plaintiffs in July against the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), challenging the National Firearms Act (NFA), as it was amended in the “Big Beautiful Bill” Act, which eliminated the tax stamp for certain firearms and accessories like suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and the NFA’s “any other weapons” category, but still kept the paperwork and registration requirements.

The complaint argued that with the tax now at zero, the NFA was no longer producing revenue for the federal government and that eliminated the legal justification for the law. Now, SSF argued in a statement on its website, “[t]he law’s only effect is to create burdensome regulations, slow approval times, and a federal registry of law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their rights,” making the NFA “nothing more than a restriction and registration scheme” and opening the law up to new constitutional challenges.

A 48-page memorandum of law submitted by the DOJ moving for summary judgment on Thursday revealed that the government would in fact seek to defend the NFA by arguing it was still a “valid” tax.

GOA was incensed, and wrote numerous posts attacking the DOJ, accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of being no better than prior Democratic administrations and liberal gun control groups.

One tweet included a link to the DOJ memo with “BREAKING” and red siren emojis, and the caption, “In an ultimate betrayal of the 2nd Amendment, the Trump admin is DEFENDING the archaic National Firearms Act of 1934.”

In a series of additional tweets, GOA said that Bondi had “just taken the most expansive view of federal power since FDR,” was “channeling the [Brady Foundation] and [Everytown] hysteria” to argue that some of the firearms regulated by the NFA were “weapons of war.”

GOA highlighted a specific section of the memo and wrote that Bondi “just made the argument for banning EVERY HANDGUN IN AMERICA.”

“Seeking to curtail armed crime, the NFA targeted particularly dangerous and easily concealable weapons that ‘could be used readily and efficiently by criminals,'” the memo read, citing multiple cases that addressed regulation of “concealable” weapons as “likely to be used for criminal purposes,” and “valued for their ability to be easily concealed and to unleash devastating damage at short range.”

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