AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

The High Points:

• GOA criticizes Pam Bondi and DOJ for continuing Biden’s lawsuit against Missouri’s SAPA.

• Courts struck SAPA mainly for attempting to nullify federal gun laws, violating the Supremacy Clause.

• The article argues Trump’s executive philosophy makes DOJ opposition unsurprising despite pro-2A rhetoric.

This is one of those situations where gun-rights groups are furious at the DOJ, but the legal reality is a lot messier than the headlines. Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act wasn’t just about stopping state agencies from helping enforce federal gun laws—that part would’ve probably survived. Instead, the law claimed federal laws were “invalid” in Missouri and threatened civil penalties against officers and agencies who ever cooperated, past or present. That’s where the courts slammed the brakes, citing the Supremacy Clause and decades of precedent rejecting state nullification.

GOA is blaming Pam Bondi and President Trump for continuing Biden’s lawsuit, but the truth is this fight isn’t about Trump suddenly going soft on the Second Amendment. It’s about Trump’s long-standing view that the federal executive—not the states—is in charge. If Missouri rewrites the law to simply prohibit cooperation with federal enforcement, without trying to nullify federal statutes, the whole thing becomes legally defensible. That’s the smart path forward.

From Bearing Arms:

Gun Owners of America is taking another swipe at Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ, this time not for defending the National Firearms Act, but for continuing the Biden administration’s lawsuit against Missouri over the state’s Second Amendment Preservation Act.

In a video released on Thursday, GOA’s Deputy Director of Federal Affairs Ben Sanderson says the DOJ’s stance on Missouri’s SAPA law “would seem to fly in the face of President Trump’s own executive order protecting Second Amendment rights,” and accusing Bondi of “killing a state-level Second Amendment protection law.”

Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act is dead at SCOTUS—a tragedy for Missouri gun owners and for gun owners nationwide. pic.twitter.com/9pg2hxrzpn

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) December 4, 2025

As Sanderson describes it, the Second Amendment Preservation Act (not the Second Amendment Protection Act as Sanderson referred to it) was Missouri’s “effort to ensure that its officers and resources would not be used to enforce federal gun control measures that exceeded constitutional limits.”

On a basic level, the law prohibited state officials from enforcing certain federal firearms statutes and penalizes agencies that cooperated with them. Basically, the law said that the federal government cannot force state-level employees to carry out federal gun control policy.

That’s true, but Sanderson’s explanation leaves out a couple of important features of the law, including two that were the basis of the district and appellate courts’ decision to invalidate the law.

First, and most importantly, the courts ruled that Missouri’s SAPA violated the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution by attempting to nullify some federal laws. SAPA states that federal acts including, but not limited to, taxes that “might reasonably be expected to create a chilling effect on the purchase or ownership” of firearms; “registration or tracking of firearms” or “registration or tracking ofthe ownership of firearms”; any act forbidding the possession” of a firearm “by law-abiding citizens”; and “any act ordering the confiscation of firearms… from law-abiding citizens” “shall be invalid to this state, shall not be recognized by this state, shall be specifically rejected by this state, and shall not be enforced by this state.”

SAPA further declares that it is “the duty of the courts and law enforcement agencies of this state” to protect the Second Amendment rights of its citizens.

There were concerns about this language, even from Second Amendment supporters, during the legislative debate over SAPA. Yes, as Sanderson notes, it has been well established by the Supreme Court in cases like Printz that state and local law enforcement cannot be compelled to enforce federal law. At the same time, attempts by states to nullify federal law have never gone well, dating back to the nullification crisis in Andrew Jackson’s presidency.

The Eighth Circuit didn’t dispute the fact that Missouri could direct state and local law enforcement from enforcing federal gun laws. It objected, though, to the language that purported to invalidate and de-recognize some federal law, no matter how vague that language may have been.

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