Run Silent, Lack Standing

In Paxton v. Dettelbach, individual plainitffs challenged a law about firearm silencers, making these statements about their standing:

I intend to personally manufacture a firearm suppressor for my own non-commercial, personal use. The firearm suppressor will be manufactured in my home from basic materials without the inclusion of any part imported from another state other than a generic and insignificant part, such as a spring, screw, nut, or pin.

The Fifth Circuit found those statements inadequate for two reasons:

1. “[T]he declarations do not state any intention to engage in conduct
   proscribed by law,” because the federal law at issue was not a blanket prohibition (emphasis added).
2. “[T]he declarations lack the necessary detail to establish that the Individual Plaintiffs’ professed intent to make a silencer is sufficiently ‘serious’ to render their feared injury ‘imminent’ rather than merely speculative or hypothetical. As the Supreme Court explained in Lujan, at the summary-judgment stage, declarants’ profession of “‘some day’ intentions [to engage in certain conduct]—without any description of concrete plans, or indeed even any specification of when the some day will be—do not support a finding of the ‘actual or imminent’ injury” required for standing.”

And the Court rejected Texas’s claim to standing based on its “quasi-sovereign interests in its citizens’ health and well-being” and “its sovereign interest in the power to create and enforce a legal code.” No. 23-10802 (June 21, 2024).