ATF Hands Judges Loaded Weapons—And Lessons to Ponder on Bench

Before a group of judges and attorneys stepped into a Texas shooting range last week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sat them down for a little chat.

The presentation was titled “Privately Made Firearms,” a reference to the kinds of guns and components that can be made at home, without the tracing elements like serial numbers that can help law enforcement figure out the source of a weapon.

Attendees got to watch a 3D printer put out a component that can rig a gun to shoot automatic fire, and even a couple videos showing automatic weapons in use in the real world. That got an accurate warning ahead of time that it’d get a little gruesome.

Punctuating the presentation was the sound of guns, including automatic weapons, being fired in a shooting range just feet away by attendees who paid a little extra to go “shooting with the pros,” — under the watchful eye of the ATF. (Those of us who were less experienced with guns hit the range after the presentation.)

Plenty of things about the Eastern District of Texas’s bench-bar conference are unusual, so it wasn’t out of place to go shooting with a group of federal judges in a state known for its embrace of the Second Amendment. What was unexpected was a federal agency instructing about the kinds of weapons they’re tasked with taking off the streets, and that could show up on any judge’s criminal docket.

The Eastern District of Texas is more known for its patent cases, but isn’t without gun prosecutions. The district’s US attorney earlier this year signed onto a statewide initiative called “Operation Texas Kill Switch,” against the very Glock switches we used on the range. The switches themselves are classified as machine guns under the law, and possessing an unregistered one can carry a sentence of up to 10 years.

The US Supreme Court is also grappling with the issues we learned about that day: One of the first cases the justices heard this term was on the Biden administration’s regulations against “ghost gun” kits, which can be used to assemble a firearm at home.

Judges and other participants in the Eastern District of Texas bench-bar conference got to try out this Thompson submachine gun.

Photographer: Jacqueline Thomsen/Bloomberg Law

I’d only fired a gun for the first time a few days earlier, at a range in Virginia not far from where I live in Washington. And here I was firing a “Tommy” gun, the favorite of Prohibition-era gangsters. It was so loud some attendees chose to step out of the range.

Yet the Glock with a switch enabled was definitely more intense. The ATF agent instructed me to brace myself a little more and aim a little lower on the target than I had for the regular or semi-automatic shots.

Firing an automatic weapon certainly doesn’t raise the kind of ethics issue that could get a federal judge kicked off a case. It’s more the kind of lived experience that might add another layer of understanding the next time one of those judges has a gun charge on their docket.

Former US District Judge Lee Yeakel, who sat in Austin until his retirement last year, said he used to regularly go shooting with US marshals, to make sure his self defense skills were still sharp. He said it was also valuable to hear from the marshals about new or updated weapons being used.

“It’s good to know how these things operate, so you’re not just hearing it from somebody sitting in your courtroom, explaining how it felt for them to do it,” Yeakel said.

While he didn’t attend the shooting event at this conference, Yeakel said that those sorts of outside experiences are helpful for judges who might otherwise be isolated in court.

“Judges are better judges if they have a better frame of reference to what’s going on in their communities, separate and apart from what they just hear in their courtrooms,” Yeakel said.