On November 26, 2008, Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) and Gun Owners of America (GOA) filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Bill Akins effort to reverse a 2006 ruling handed down by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) that the Akins Accelerator is an illegal machinegun.

Prior to the 2006 ruling, Mr. Akins submitted the accelerator to ATF, requesting that ATF determine whether the accelerator converted a semi-automatic firearm into a machinegun. Twice, ATF notified Mr. Akins that it had tested the accelerator and determined that it was not a machinegun. Rather, both tests revealed that the accelerator simply enabled a semiautomatic rifle to shoot at an increased rate of fire, not with a single pull of the trigger, but only upon subsequent multiple functions of the trigger pressing against the shooter’s well-placed trigger finger. Thus, the accelerator did not fit within the statutory definition of a machinegun because the firearm did not shoot automatically at the “single function of the trigger.”

In reliance on this official ATF decision, Mr. Akins invested his life savings to bring the accelerator into commercial production and sale. Within months after the accelerator was placed on the market, ATF issued its 2006 ruling that the accelerator was — after all — a machinegun, forcing Mr. Akins to close down his company and cease production and sales. To reach this decision, ATF overruled its previous decision because the multiple trigger functions were not caused by a multiple trigger “pulls,” but were set in motion by an initial “single pull” of the trigger.

In support of Mr. Akins’ primary claim that the ATF 2006 decision was arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to the legal definition of a machinegun, the GOF/GOA amicus brief emphasizes that the 2006 ruling was made in flagrant disregard of the plain language of the statutory definition of a machinegun — that “single function of the trigger” was not the same as “single pull of the trigger.” Indeed, as pointed out in the amicus brief, ATF substituted “single pull of the trigger” for “single function of the trigger” because it was “necessary” to protect the “public safety” — as if Congress had given ATF unbridled discretion to outlaw “dangerous weapons,” when in fact Congress had enacted the Firearms Owners Protection Act (FOPA) in 1986 to specifically limit ATF discretion, not to unleash it.

Calling attention to Congress’s commitment in FOPA to confine the reach of federal firearms statutes to the constitutional parameters set forth in the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the GOF/GOA brief urged the court of appeals not to defer to ATF’s claimed firearms “expertise,” calling the court’s attention to the recent Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment’s “enshrinement” of an individual right to keep and bear arms “necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.”

A decision on the Akins appeal is expected in the summer or fall of 2009.