Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Is ATF’s ‘Sporting Purposes’ Test A Dead Infringement Walking?

(The White House/Fox News/Rumble)

One of the oldest regulations that has impacted the ability of law-abiding gun owners to purchase firearms of their choice could be off the books soon.

During an April 29 press conference announcing that three major regulations imposed by the Biden administration were slated to be axed, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Justice Department was also reviewing the “sporting purposes” test regulations initially implemented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) under the Gun Control Act of 1968. For about 20 years, the regulation was primarily used to restrict handgun imports through the so-called “factoring criteria” outlined on Form 4590 before it was used to target modern semiautomatic rifles that anti-Second Amendment groups labeled as “assault weapons” following a 1989 mass shooting in Stockton, California.

“ATF is studying right now to determine which rifles are generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes,” Blanche said during the press conference. “That’s going to be an ongoing effort over the next several months and we’re going to see that through.”

In 1989, the ATF ultimately blocked the importation of semiautomatic rifles that bore a superficial resemblance to military-issue assault rifles like the AK-47, FN FAL, Heckler and Koch G3 and the Steyr AUG. Nine years later, in 1998, the agency tightened the ban to include rifles capable of accepting standard magazines used in the military-issue rifles and their semi-automatic-only clones.

Anti-Second Amendment agitators and organizations often use the term “assault weapons” in order to gain support for banning semi-automatic firearms with features that give them a cosmetic similarity to firearms capable of fully-automatic operation. Fully-automatic firearms are already heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934.

However, that test may not be around for long in light of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. In 2008, 40 years after the “sporting purposes” test was used to restrict firearms imports, the high court issued its ruling in Heller v. District of Columbia, in which it declared that self-defense is a lawful purpose for owning a firearm.

“The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,” former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. “The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose.”

The Supreme Court has since struck down other laws on Second Amendment grounds in McDonald v. Chicago and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Constitutional attorney Stephen Halbrook, one of the foremost Second Amendment scholars, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that those rulings could be a death knell for the “sporting purposes” test, which was used to ban the importation of modern semiautomatic rifles in the late 1980s and 1990s.

“Limitation of the import of firearms to those the government decides are particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes violates the Second Amendment,” Halbrook said. “In 1989 and again in 1998, the government arbitrarily decided that firearms previously considered sporting were no longer sporting.”

Halbrook also outlined how the ban could be taken down via litigation.

“A licensed importer would apply to ATF to import several specific semiauto rifles and include documents in support demonstrating that they are (per Heller) in common use for lawful purposes, including self-defense,” Halbrook told the DCNF. “After the permit is denied, the importer and persons wishing to purchase the rifles would be plaintiffs in a civil suit claiming denial of Second Amendment rights.”

ATF and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the DCNF.