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CAT Outdoors CAT Outdoors covers the court cases, laws, and rulings that affect gun owners, explained in plain English. News and reviews at catoutdoors.com.

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10/03/2026

JUST IN: New Jersey has asked the Supreme Court to step into the fight over its AR-15 ban.

In July, a federal appeals court ruled 10-5 that the state's bans on semi-automatic ri**es and magazines over 10 rounds are unconstitutional.

New Jersey's answer, filed October 1, is 10 pages long. It doesn't argue the court got it wrong. It asks the justices to wait until they decide the Illinois and Connecticut r***e cases being argued December 2.

The ruling against New Jersey is frozen for as long as that petition is pending. So the bans stay in force, likely into the middle of next year.

Full story in the comments.

10/02/2026

🚨 BREAKING: A federal judge has blocked Connecticut's G***k ban.

Judge Kari Dooley issued a preliminary injunction on September 30, one day before the law was set to make selling a newly built G***k a felony.

Her finding: the ban is "presumptively unconstitutional," and Connecticut failed to show otherwise.

The state couldn't explain why a G***k made on September 30 was fine to sell while the identical pistol made 24 hours later was too dangerous.

The ruling is preliminary. The governor says he's evaluating his legal options, and the attorney general says the state will keep defending the law.

California, Maryland, and New York have similar laws on the books.

Full story in the comments.

10/01/2026

On September 24, the Justice Department sued Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul over the state's 30-day wait to buy a handgun or an AR-15. Minnesota's law says a buyer without a carry permit waits 30 days, or applies for a purchase permit that the police chief has 30 days to approve and that expires every year.

The complaint then made a claim that goes past the statute. It said approvals from the Minneapolis and St. Paul police chiefs "commonly exceed the statutory limit of 30 days," and that some people have waited nearly 60.

To be fair to the state, the complaint offered no data for that, and the law does let a chief waive the wait for someone whose life is threatened. But the waiver belongs to the same office that is accused of missing the deadline, and the permit statute has no penalty for a department that runs late and no remedy for the applicant who is left waiting.

Nothing changes for Minnesota buyers today, because the government hasn't asked for a preliminary injunction yet. What matters is the legal theory: the DOJ is using the federal police-misconduct statute, and if a judge accepts it, the same complaint works against every state with a waiting period.

Full breakdown in the first comment.

Last week eight U.S. senators sent the Attorney General a letter about a number the ATF had just handed to Congress: 1,4...
09/30/2026

Last week eight U.S. senators sent the Attorney General a letter about a number the ATF had just handed to Congress: 1,414,088,513. That is the count of pages of gun-purchase records the bureau is holding from dealers that went out of business, and 92 percent of them are already digital images sitting on federal systems in Martinsburg, West Virginia. If you ever bought a gun from a shop that later closed, your Form 4473 is in that pile, with your name, your address, and the serial number of what you bought.

The ATF's answer is that this is not a registry. The bureau says the files are stored as static images, indexed only by the closed dealer's license number, with no character recognition to pull out buyer names. That is technically accurate. The bureau wrote the same thing in a FOIA response back in 2022, and a former director once told Congress the ATF pays Adobe extra to have the search function removed from Acrobat.

What that defense actually describes, though, is a setting. The scanners the bureau uses ship with text recognition built in, and a search field that has been switched off can be switched back on. Federal law since 1986 says the government may not build a system of registration of fi****ms or fi****ms owners, and a spending rider Congress made permanent in 2012 bars the ATF from consolidating dealer records at all. The bureau's own proposed rule, published in May, concedes that cutting the retention period would "alleviate concerns that ATF might have established or will establish a registry."

The archive held 461 million pages in 2020, 920 million in 2021, and 1.41 billion today, growing by roughly 80 million pages a year. Two years after ATF had to confirm a ransomware gang breached one of its systems, the senators and Rep. Michael Cloud are asking the Justice Department to investigate the database and destroy whatever was kept in violation of the law. The takeaway worth remembering is that the only thing standing between 1.4 billion pages and a searchable list of gun owners is a checkbox the bureau controls.

The photo is the government's own, taken by the Government Accountability Office inside the National Tracing Center for its 2016 audit of these records.

Full breakdown in the first comment.

09/29/2026

In April 2022, a man fired about 239 rounds from an apartment across the street from a private school in Washington, D.C., badly wounding a mother who was waiting in her car and the school's security guard before he took his own life. The two survivors later sued Daniel Defense, which made his r***e, along with Magpul, SureFire, BCM, Federal, Fiocchi and several other companies whose gear he had bought.

Their theory was that the companies' marketing caused the attack, that military-themed social media posts sold a "warrior mentality" to young men like him. What the lawsuit never alleged was that he saw any particular one of those ads. The closest it came was a single sentence, pleaded "upon information and belief," saying he was "exposed to and influenced by" the companies' marketing.

A federal judge in Virginia threw the case out for exactly that reason, writing that the complaint did "no more than speculate" that the shooter had seen the ads. Then this February, a divided Fourth Circuit panel brought it back, ruling that the families didn't have to allege he saw any specific ad at all. The dissenting judge put it plainly: "Speculation or guesswork will not do. But that is all plaintiffs in this case have."

Now the case is at the Supreme Court. Last week the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation filed a brief pointing out that gun makers have used military themes in their advertising since the Founding, from Colt's "Peacemaker" to the Henry r***e's "Always Loaded and Always Ready," and West Virginia and 21 other states are backing the companies too. The families had waived their right to respond, and the Court asked for a response anyway, a sign that at least one justice wants a closer look.

The takeaway is simple. If a lawsuit can go forward against a gun maker without alleging the shooter ever saw its ads, then every company that sells a lawful r***e with a patriotic or military-flavored post is one stranger's crime away from a courtroom. The families' answer is due October 26.

Full breakdown in the first comment.

09/28/2026

In July 2024, a federal judge in Texas ruled that forced reset triggers are not machine guns and that the ATF had exceeded its authority by classifying them that way. The government fought the ruling for a while, then settled in May 2025, returned the triggers it had seized, and agreed to leave FRTs alone. On paper, that was the end of it. The gun owners won.

So it caught our attention when, on August 31 of this year, the Department of Justice showed up in a Texas patent courtroom on the ATF's behalf. Not to argue that forced reset triggers are illegal. The government conceded that fight. Instead, DOJ filed a formal statement supporting Rare Breed Triggers, the company that holds the FRT patents, in its lawsuits against nearly a hundred competing trigger makers, telling the judge that shutting those competitors down would serve public safety.

To be fair, there is nothing improper about Rare Breed enforcing its patents, and the government files statements in private lawsuits all the time. That part is routine.

What is not routine is the reason it made this promise. The government's own 2025 settlement with Rare Breed included a term most people never read: Rare Breed agreed to enforce its patents against other FRT makers, and DOJ agreed to consider backing those lawsuits in court. The agency that could not ban these triggers through regulation arranged for the one company it made peace with to sue the rest of the market, with the government's public endorsement.

One of the targeted companies put it bluntly in its response last week: executive agencies never serve the public interest by manipulating private patent enforcement to create a government-backed monopoly.

The takeaway worth remembering is that losing in court did not end the government's campaign against these triggers. It just moved the campaign somewhere with fewer rules.

Full breakdown in the first comment.

09/25/2026

This week, hundreds of gun dealers sat down in a Dallas conference room for a compliance summit, and the ATF's top leadership walked in and started answering questions. By the time the sessions ended, the industry had something it almost never gets from the bureau: actual dates.

According to reporting from the event, ATF Director Robert Cekada said compliance guidance for suppressor and SBR transfers is expected within weeks, and that it will also address interstate travel with NFA items. Since the court injunction took hold in August, suppressors have been transferring on a regular Form 4473 with a background check, while SBRs stayed stuck in the old Form 4 line because of a separate provision in the Gun Control Act. The coming guidance is expected to close that gap.

The bureau is also rewriting the Form 4473 itself for release after the holidays, and following the DOJ's September 17 legal opinion, it's updating its systems to allow handgun sales to adults aged 18 to 20. What makes all of this remarkable is that none of it came from a court order or a leak. The agency simply stood in front of the dealers it regulates and told them what's coming.

Nothing changes at the counter today, but the timelines are finally on the record, and that's more than gun owners have had in years. The full story is in the first comment.

09/24/2026

On December 2, the Supreme Court will hear one hour of argument on whether Cook County, Illinois and the state of Connecticut can ban the AR-15, and the ruling will set the ceiling for every r***e ban in the country. It is the biggest Second Amendment case since Bruen, and the theory the government needs to win rests on a specific historical claim.

That claim, in the Seventh Circuit's own words, is that there is a tradition "unchanged from the time when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution" of separating military-style weapons from personal ones and keeping the former away from civilians. In other words, since 1791, America has never let ordinary citizens own war-grade arms, so it doesn't have to start now.

To be fair, that sounds like it could be true. Most people assume it is.

The problem is the Constitution itself. Article I gives Congress the power to grant letters of marque, which were licenses for privately owned warships to hunt enemy shipping, and it simultaneously forbids the STATES from keeping ships of war without congressional consent. The Founders restricted government military hardware and expressly authorized private citizens to own the most devastating weapons systems of their age.

They used that power, too. According to the National Park Service, the Revolution saw about 1,700 letters of marque issued and nearly 800 privately owned vessels commissioned as privateers, which captured or destroyed some 600 British ships. One of them, the Caesar of Boston, was a private ship that carried 26 cannons. The generation that wrote the Second Amendment won its independence in part with privately owned warships, then wrote the licensing system for them into the founding document.

So when a federal court says the founding era kept military-grade arms out of private hands, it is describing a founding era that never happened. Justice Kavanaugh has already written that AR-15 owners have "a strong argument" under existing precedent, and the Justice Department has now filed on the owners' side. In December we find out whether five justices are willing to say what the record shows.

Full breakdown in the first comment.

09/23/2026

On Sunday, September 21, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the fi***rm industry's trade association, joined Texas pistol maker Shadow Systems and Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, Connecticut in filing an emergency lawsuit in federal court. They're trying to stop a law that takes effect October 1, when selling a newly manufactured G***k-style handgun in Connecticut becomes a Class D felony worth up to five years in prison.

Connecticut says the law is aimed at machine gun conversion devices, the small switches that turn a pistol into a machine gun.

The switch itself has been a federal crime for decades. Federal law counts the device alone as a machine gun, no pistol attached. Connecticut's new law doesn't touch the switch at all. What it bans is the pistol underneath: any handgun with the cross-shaped trigger bar that Gaston G***k designed in the 1980s, a design inside well over 500,000 new handguns made for the American market every year.

The same court system already saw this coming. When the Second Circuit upheld Connecticut's r***e ban last year, it pointed out that residents could still buy "popular semiautomatic handguns like the G***k 17." Nine months later, Connecticut made selling a new one a felony.

A federal judge in Bridgeport hears the case September 29, two days before the law takes effect. Full breakdown in the first comment.

09/23/2026

On Tuesday morning, September 15, a little after 9 a.m., a man was pumping gas at the Shell station at 151st and Harlem in Orland Park, Illinois. A masked 20-year-old then walked up, pointed a gun at him, and demanded his property.

What the robber didn't know was that the customer holds an Illinois concealed carry license and was carrying a pistol in his waistband. Within seconds the man drew and fired, and the robbery ended right there.

The suspect ran off and was found in a nearby parking lot with a bullet wound to the cheek. He's now charged with attempted armed robbery and four other felonies, and police say both the gun he carried and the car he drove to the station had been stolen out of Indiana. The man he tried to rob wasn't hurt, is cooperating with police, and has not been charged with anything.

The takeaway worth remembering is that a pistol in the center console would have been useless in that moment. He was anchored to a pump with his hands busy, which is exactly the situation where carrying on your body is the only carrying that counts.

Full story in the first comment.

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