I think the striking down of the Hughes Amendment, or especially the entire NFA, would moot the entire issue of pistol braces, bump stocks, trigger resets, etc., and it would secure significant gun rights for a generation, and sort of put some of the organizations "on ice" so to speak, unable to raise tens of millions of dollars from donors.
I don't believe any of them have any real intention of mounting a direct challenge to the NFA or even just the Hughes Amendment to get the registry open to new full-auto.
They trim and prune the branches but won't swing the axe at the trunk. I just don't see any serious determination to drive hard against the NFA in a direct facial challenge.
Bump stocks and pistol braces are frankly trivial and are not something I would expend significant amounts of resources litigating over. I would rather litigate over the very NFA itself and moot the issues on simulated full auto toys and pistol braces making rifles SBR, by simply eliminating regulations/classification of the SBR.
Many of these organizations need ongoing crisis situations to justify raising money from donors.
A fire department that never has a fire to put out, will quickly find its budget slashed. There has to be some fire, somewhere, at some point, or else people will grow complacent and won't pay up.
The NRA needs ongoing threats to gun rights and ongoing litigation over trivial gun rights issues.
Don't forget, the NRA did not support Heller in the Heller v DC case and they tried to derail his progress to getting before the US Supreme Court.
The monumental case bearing his name changed the gun debate forever, but his crusade to get rid of all gun regulation was just getting started.
www.thetrace.org
Four years into the litigation, Parker and four other original plaintiffs were dropped from the case because they lacked legal standing, meaning they hadn’t suffered enough of an “injury,” in technical terms, to file suit. Heller, meanwhile, still held the trump card that vonBreichenrucharft had engineered: the denied gun permit. That was enough to sue. Parker v. D.C. was renamed Heller v. D.C., with Dick Heller as the sole plaintiff.
The case still faced other hurdles. Early on, lawyers for the NRA — fearing pro-gun forces lacked enough votes to convince a Supreme Court majority that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms — tried to talk Levy out of pursuing the case. They then attempted to dissuade him from using as his lead lawyer an untested sole practitioner, Alan Gura. Doubting Heller’s prospects, the NRA filed a competing suit, Seegars v. Ashcroft, helmed by a leading Second Amendment advocate, Stephen Halbrook.
The NRA’s concerns were strategic, but Levy says now that something else was going on. “I think the real concern was that three lawyers from outside the NRA started stepping on some toes, and the NRA wasn’t appreciative,” he says.
During the Supreme Court oral arguments in Heller, Gura claimed the court could secure gun rights for individuals while still allowing for certain restrictions, such as a machine gun ban. Gura’s concession — followed by language in Scalia’s majority opinion that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt” on longstanding regulations such as restrictions on felons “or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” — realigned the spectrum of gun-rights advocates. Gura had spent the previous five years racing past the NRA, fueled by a belief that they could upend centuries of law. But even that brash position paled in comparison with the radicalism of absolutists, and now Gura and his associates found themselves to the left of hard-line advocates.