Gun supply business sues agency over order

Butler County firm decries ‘secret’ effort

A Butler County gun supply business has sued the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, saying the agency has been implementing a “secret and unannounced” campaign since 2018 to stop dealers from selling unregulated gun parts.

Not an LLC, which does business as JSD Supply in Prospect, filed the suit in federal court Friday against ATF and the U.S. Department of Justice and asked for a restraining order to block a May 9 order from ATF to stop selling gun kits and components.

The company said the order has no statutory authority but has forced the shop to suspend all sales, causing “immediate and substantial financial losses” in violation of the Constitution.

The suit says ATF, starting in December 2018, has been enforcing a “secret” policy change regarding the sale of “80 percent frames and receivers” and the tools and parts needed to assemble guns.

The term “80 percent receiver,” the part of a firearm that contains its trigger assembly, is used in the gun industry to denote a product that is an incomplete frame or receiver. Customers with some mechanical skills buy them so they can make their own guns without starting from scratch. The suit says that an 80% receiver is not considered a gun under the 1968 Gun Control Act, so it’s not under ATF’s authority to regulate.

JSD says it mostly sells gunrelated parts and tools that are not regulated by the Gun Control Act, yet ATF is telling the business it can’t sell them.

Without a U.S. judge stepping in, according to the suit, “ATF will be rewarded in its unlawful action” against JSD and continue to “incrementally move the goalposts to effect policy change (at the behest of the current administration which

repeatedly has expressed hostility to the Second Amendment rights of Americans, and announced its intention to enact gun control policy without Congress).”

ATF agents showed up at JSD on May 12 and issued a cease-and-desist order dated May 9 out of the Philadelphia field office, which handles the Pittsburgh region. The order said JSD had been selling gun components and kits to make a functional gun to a single customer on multiple occasions.

The order said kits that include all the components necessary to make a gun are classified as guns under the Gun Control Act. It also said that components necessary for making a gun don’t have to be sold as part of a kit to be considered a gun.

“These piecemeal sales circumvent the requirements of the [Gun Control Act] and are unlawful,” ATF said.

The order told JSD to stop selling guns without a license and stop selling components to produce a gun in single or multiple sales to one person.

JSD says the order is vague and failed to explain how the company could be expected to avoid selling components to a single customer in what ATF described as“structured” transactions.

The suit also says the customers are the ones making the “structured” transactions, not JSD. In addition, it said there’s no law prohibiting Americans from buying gun parts to make their own guns.

“Moreover,” the suit says, “many of Plaintiff’s customers have made purchases in the past over many years, and ATF’s C&D Order did not put any temporal limitations on its warning to avoid ‘structuring.’ In other words, ATF has not explained whether the sale of a firearm part to a customer years ago would prevent the sale of a different firearm part today.”

The suit says JSD tried to get clarification from ATF to no avail and accuses the agency of targeting only JSD with its order, which the complaint says constitutes harassment.

JSD says there are hundreds if not thousands of other companies in the U.S. and online offering gun parts to make a firearm.

“This raises the obvious question as to why ATF made the decision to target Plaintiff with a cease-and-desist order,” the suit says, “effectively shutting down its business, for doing nothing more than following standard industry practice.”

In addition to the ATF and DOJ, the suit names Gary Restaino, acting head of ATF, as a defendant.

The DOJ does not comment on pending litigation.