ATF Prosecutes Sheriff Over Using Department Guns at Public Machine Gun Shoot

November 06, 2024 By David Codrea

In October, a coalition of public and private firearms rights defenders “filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit opposing the ATF’s unlawful attempt to expand the scope of the 1986 machine gun ban (also known as the Hughes Amendment) through its prosecution of former Iowa Police Chief Bradley Wendt,” a Palmetto State Armory video announces.

“Amici curiae [friends of the court] consist of firearms associations, States, and two companies that design, produce, and sell firearms,” the brief declares, identifying them as the “Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition, Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, Palmetto State Armory, B&T USA, and the states of West Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Utah in support of defendant appellant” Wendt.

“In July, Chief Wendt was sentenced to federal prison for taking his police department machine gun to a public range day event,” the Palmetto State Armory video elaborates. “Knowing that a jury could easily find this conduct lawful, ATF realized they needed something beyond the law passed by Congress to obtain a conviction—namely, jamming into the jury instructions an additional requirement that taking the machine gun to the range be part of his ‘official duties’ -- something not found in the law.”

To hear the Department of Justice tell it, they had Chief Wendt dead to rights after he was sentenced to “60 months in federal prison for conspiring to make false statements to the ATF, making false statements to the ATF, and illegal possession of a machine gun.” Their recounting of the charges sounds damning: “Wendt used his position as Chief of Police to obtain machine guns for his own personal use and profit, including to buy machine guns for his own store (BW Outfitters, a federal firearms licensee in Denison, Iowa)”

“Generally, machine guns made after May 1986 are illegal to transfer and possess. But law enforcement agencies can buy machine guns,” DOJ explains. Wendt wrote law letters to ATF “requesting the purchase or demonstration of 90 machine guns for … his two-man department [and] said he was buying the machine guns for the official use…”

“Evidence at trial showed that Wendt purchased machine guns for the Adair Police Department, but later resold those machine guns at a personal profit of nearly $80,000,” DOJ states. “Wendt was also convicted of one count of illegal possession of a machine gun, based on his personal possession of a belt-fed, M60 machine gun registered to the Adair Police Department. Wendt, along with his gun store BW Outfitters, hosted a machine gun shoot in April 2022, where he charged the public to shoot machine guns, including several registered to the Adair Police Department.”

Police designating themselves the “Only Ones” to be trusted with arms and claiming exemptions to infringements the people are subjected to invites corruption, and seeing officials “hoist with their own petard” hardly invites sympathy. Organized law enforcement is the de facto standing army feared by the Framers as control freak politicians declare even semiautomatics to be “weapons of war” to be denied to the masses, while the whole point of the Second Amendment is to have a populace armed and trained for “the security of a free State” and for defense of themselves.

So, it’s not unfair to wonder what’s in it for gun owners to come to Wendt’s defense?

First, anything that helps establish the utter illegitimacy of the government involving itself in imposing and enforcing infringements works in gun owners’ interests. As is stopping ATF from enforcing even more unenacted edicts by “unilaterally expanding its regulatory authority with criminal consequences—this time by incorporating guidance documents and regulatory provisions into jury instructions.”

“The jury found Wendt was not acting within the scope of his official duties when he possessed the M60 machine gun,” DOJ crows.

Not so fast, the brief responded.

“First, as the Chief of Police, Wendt was entirely exempt from the firearms prohibitions at issue here,” it argues. “By its own terms, section 925(a)(1) removes firearms acquired by police officers from the GCA—rendering Wendt’s prosecution unlawful. The law empowers ATF to regulate the transfer and possession of machineguns but is silent as to their use.”

“Wendt was charged with submitting false statements which the ATF—under the terms of its own regulations—could not consider,” the brief continues. “False or not, the materiality of statements submitted to an agency that lacked the discretion to consider them is an issue of law which never should have reached the jury.”

“Wendt was in lawful possession of the machinegun,” the brief documents. “The district court’s jury instruction contravened the law” it shows.

“[I]nstead of requiring that Wendt prove he possessed the machinegun under the authority the City of Adair Police Department—which he did—the court demanded that he prove he used the firearm in the course of his official duties,” the brief exposes. “The instruction injected a use-dependent inquiry found nowhere in the text.”

“Wendt’s false statement convictions are equally defective,” the brief contends. “As a matter of law, Wendt’s statements in the Law Letters were incapable of influencing ATF because they fell outside the scope of what the agency could properly consider.”

“ATF’s tactic is clear,” the Palmetto State Armory video concludes. “Pursue through prosecution what it can’t achieve by regulation—much less legislation—in the hope it can create case law favorable to the federal government.”

All the legal technicalities being raised may seem like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin to gun owners who know, as Continental Congress Delegate Tench Coxe observed back in 1788, “Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American.... [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."

We have the right to own, buy, and sell arms, and any suggestion to the contrary at the time of the Constitution’s ratification would have resulted in it being rejected. Not only do DOJ and ATF have no legitimate authority to impose infringements, but Congress also has no enumerated authority to delegate them. Unfortunately, much like Napoleon placing the crown on his own head, that authority has been usurped and established, and the federal Leviathan has amassed the occupying troops to impose its will. At least, for now, we still have the courts, as imperfect and often wrong a recourse as they provide. As such, the coalition supporting Chief Wendt is doing what it can with the options it has, and thus is working not just on his behalf, but on all of ours.