A Leacock Township Amish farmer is challenging a federal indictment of dealing firearms without a license after agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) seized hundreds of guns from him earlier this year.
Reuben King of Gordonville was charged in June for allegedly selling firearms from October of 2019 until January without a proper license. The ATF raided his farm on West Cattail Road in January, confiscating a total of 614 guns, including rifles and shotguns of various calibers, according to court documents.
King told media outlets at the time of the confiscation that he sold long guns mostly to the Amish for hunting out of his own private collection and that selling guns was not his main business, instead working primarily as a dairy farmer.
King was released in July on $50,000 bail, and his trial was originally scheduled to begin on Nov. 14 at the Edward N. Cahn Courthouse & Federal Building in Allentown in front of U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Leeson Jr. He won a continuance in his trial until Jan. 30 after Leeson ruled in September that failure to grant the delay “would result in a miscarriage of justice” because of the complications of King’s Amish religious beliefs and “pretrial briefing on numerous complex legal issues.”
If convicted, King could be sentenced for to up to five years in prison and fined up to $250,000.
Motion to Dismiss
In a motion to dismiss the indictment filed on Nov. 7, King’s attorney Joshua Prince of Bechtelsville, Berks County, argued the single charge should be dismissed on several points, including new legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, recent gun decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and First Amendment arguments surrounding freedom of religion.
A 15-page document posted to the ATF’s site titled, “Do I need a license to buy and sell firearms?” states that the federal Gun Control Act “requires that persons who are engaged in the business of dealing in firearms be licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
“Determining whether you are ‘engaged in the business’ of dealing in firearms requires looking at the specific facts and circumstances of your activities,” the document said, indicating that federal law doesn’t set a “bright-line” rule for when a federal firearms license is required and that there is “no specific threshold number or frequency of sales, quantity of firearms, or amount of profit or time invested that triggers the licensure requirement.”
The ATF document also says a person “will need a license if you repetitively buy and sell firearms with the principal motive of making a profit.”
The ATF document relied on Chapter 44, Title 18 of the United States Code, which defined the term “engaged in the business” of a firearms dealer as “a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms, but such term shall not include a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.”
To address some of the language vagueness, the U.S. Congress amended the definition of engaged in the business of firearms dealing through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, changing the statute portion “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” to “to predominantly earn a profit.”
Congress further defined “to predominantly earn a profit” as “[M]eans that the intent underlying the sale or disposition of firearms is predominantly one of obtaining pecuniary gain, as opposed to other intents, such as improving or liquidating a personal firearms collection: Provided, that proof of profit shall not be required as to a person who engages in the regular and repetitive purchase and disposition of firearms for criminal purposes or terrorism…”
“These changes make clear that the previous definition, under which Mr. King has been indicted, was impermissibly vague, requiring Mr. King, a man of common intelligence, to guess at its meaning,” Prince said in his filing. “As such, this Court should dismiss the indictment as violative of the rule of lenity and on the basis that the charged offense is void for vagueness.”
Prince also argued that the recent decision by SCOTUS in the case New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen lays out a methodology to determine if the “plain text” in the Second Amendment overrides a state or federal law regarding firearms.
“An inescapable precondition of keeping and bearing arms is purchasing those arms, making the implicit right to buy and sell firearms a necessary complement protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” Prince said in the filing.
A second step in the Bruen test requires that the government “must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” if the regulation is to be upheld by the courts, with SCOTUS placing the timeline sometime around the early 1800’s.
Prince said it wasn’t until 1938, or 147 years after the Second Amendment was ratified, that firearms became subject to a licensing requirement through the passage of the Federal Firearm Act. The Gun Control Act of 1968 later amended the Federal Firearms Act and still governs firearms licensing today.
“There is no national historical tradition of the regulation of the commercial sale of firearms present until the 1930’s,” Prince said in his filing. He added that the absence of firearms laws from the historical tradition of the country are “facially unconstitutional as violative of the Second Amendment.”
A final argument Prince makes are issues surrounding the requirement of a photo ID to obtain a federal firearms license to sell guns. According to the statute, applicants who do not include a photograph are not eligible to receive a firearms license. “Prohibiting Mr. King and other members of the Amish faith from the ability to engage in the commercial sale of firearms, as a result of the exercise of their bonafide closely-held religious beliefs, i.e. refusing to pose for a photograph, is an unconstitutional condition which violates their First and Second Amendment rights as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993,” Prince said in his filing.
Staff writer Michael Yoder is an award-winning journalist who has been honored with several Keystone Press Awards for his investigative pieces.
