By CHARLIE SAVAGE
The N.R.A. is bringing the lawsuit in the name of two firearms dealers in Arizona. Its complaint asks a judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction barring enforcement of the rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“N.R.A. has always viewed this as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to pursue their gun control agenda through back-door rule-making, and the N.R.A. will fight them every step of the way,” said Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the gun rights group.
But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the Justice Department would “vigorously oppose” the N.R.A. challenge.
“We think that the action we have taken is consistent with the law,” Mr. Holder told reporters on Wednesday, “and that the measures that we are proposing are appropriate ones to stop the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico.”
The rule requires licensed firearms dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to report within five days whenever someone buys more than one weapon like a variant of the AK-47 assault weapon. The rule covers any semiautomatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine and ammunition larger than .22 caliber.
The rule is meant to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain military-style weapons and smuggle them to Mexico, where they are illegal to sell to consumers. American weapons — often bought by “straw buyers” who have a right to buy them for themselves — have been flooding across the Southwest border for years, fueling drug violence in Mexico.
Firearms dealers across the United States have long been required to report similar bulk sales of handguns. But the N.R.A. suit notes that the reporting rule for handgun sales was enacted by Congress as part of the statute that sets rules for licensed firearms dealers. That statute also says dealers shall not be required to report information “except as expressly provided by this section,” and the N.R.A. contends that the firearms bureau has no authority to impose a reporting requirement on long guns.
But Scot Thomasson, a spokesman for the agency, said the N.R.A. was wrong. The licensing statute requires dealers to keep records about gun sales generally, he noted, and it also says that the attorney general may require dealers to report to the government whatever information from such records as he “may specify.”
Mr. Thomasson said the courts had upheld similar regulations in the past, and noted that the rule requiring dealers to report bulk handgun sales had been imposed by the firearms agency for several years before Congress, in 1986, passed legislation codifying it as a statute.
While the suit is being paid for by the N.R.A., it is being brought in the name of the two Arizona dealers, J&G Sales of Prescott and Foothills Firearms of Yuma. The complaint said that about 8,479 licensed dealers were in the four states affected by the rule.
The two dealers had received a letter from the director of a federal firearms tracing center directing them to start reporting bulk long gun sales made after Aug. 14. But the court complaint said that complying with the rule would be costly and that the dealers could lose business from customers who would be deterred because of the loss of privacy.
The complaint also contended that the tracing center, in compiling the reports of bulk sales, might violate a separate prohibition imposed by Congress that prevents the Justice Department from keeping a centralized database of gun purchase records.
The dispute over the regulation comes at a time when the firearms bureau’s efforts to investigate straw purchasing and smuggling across the border have come under sharp Congressional scrutiny related to Operation Fast and Furious, an effort by the agency’s Phoenix division to uncover a large network of cartel-linked gunrunners.
In that operation, federal agents monitored straw buyers who bought about 2,000 guns, but did not intervene to arrest them or seize the weapons because they were trying to identify higher-ups in the network. But the bureau then lost track of many of the guns, some of which were smuggled into Mexico and two of which later turned up at the scene of a shootout in Arizona where an American Border Patrol agent was killed.
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