A US Federal Court said it is unconstitutional to require tough restrictions to license a gun.
4th Circuit struck down Maryland’s unconstitutional handgun law. We have a God-given right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. This protects us from government. Whether tyranny. Or breakdown—and mob rule. Judges matter.
~ Mike Davis
Under a new legal test, a Maryland law requiring fingerprinting, training, and up to a 30-day wait for a handgun license violates the Second Amendment.
A federal appeals court overturned one of Maryland’s toughest gun-control laws Tuesday, saying the decade-old handgun licensing statute that required fingerprinting, firearms training, and a waiting period of up to a month violated the Second Amendment.
The Washington Post Reports
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is among the first to strike down handgun permit requirements under a legal test established by the Supreme Court in 2022 that requires judges to consider whether modern-day regulations mirror what was in place around the time of the country’s founding.
The panel voted 2-1 to block Maryland’s enforcement of a key part of a 2013 law that was passed by Democratic legislators after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. It required that handgun buyers, who already faced background checks and waiting periods for purchases, obtain an additional “handgun qualification license” from Maryland officials and wait up to 30 days to have it approved, reports The Washington Post.
The Post then discussed Sandy Hook as impetus for the restrictive law.
Gun rights advocates have argued in courts across the country that dozens of long-standing state and federal gun laws cannot survive the Supreme Court’s new historical test. And judges, at times reluctantly, have agreed in cases affecting age restrictions for handgun purchases, the kinds of “sensitive places” where guns can be legally banned, and the kinds of convictions for which states can ban people from possessing guns under New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the landmark 2022 ruling that said gun restrictions were unconstitutional unless they were already in place around the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption or were closely analogous to Colonial-era restrictions.
In a follow-up case that experts say tests the reach of the high court’s Bruen decision, the justices are weighing whether domestic violence offenders can be legally disarmed.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Attorney General Anthony G. Brown, both Democrats, each said Tuesday that they are evaluating their appeal options. Maryland gun rights activists and the National Rifle Association celebrated the decision.
“This makes it very clear that the state can’t erect obstacles,” said Mark Pennak, president of Maryland Shall Issue and one of the plaintiffs who first challenged the gun licensing law in 2013. “The right to keep and bear arms necessitates the ability to acquire them. You cannot keep and bear that which you cannot acquire.”
The M Report
Those strict licensing laws haven’t stopped anything. It would be better if they followed the laws we have in place and improved the background check system.
We have revolving doors for serious gun and gang lawbreakers in New York, Chicago, and other communist states. We keep criminals on the streets, and we have open borders, letting new criminals in who can roam our streets.
I found this video at whatfinger.
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It is a continuing source of puzzlement to me how states and municipalities get away with flouting the explicit terms of the Constitution — the Second Amendment in particular. The Constitution is “the supreme law of the land,” so how do they get away with it?
Unfortunately, as a lifelong marksman, that’s a rather easy question to answer. They get away with it for many years because we don’t have a Constitutional right to carry a reliably, constitutionally conservative Supreme Court in our back pocket that we can just whip out and use as immediate protection against these tyrants and their enforcers. It takes YEARS to get an unconstitutional gun conviction overturned by running a case through all the appeals and hopefully (fingers crossed) having the U.S. Supreme Court accept your case and FINALLY weigh-in and tell these tyrants that their law was unconstitutional. Then they change a few words in their restrictive law, put some new window dressing on it and sign yet another restrictive law into effect. Again, it will be years before another denied or convicted gun owner will have their own hellish and expensive “lawfare” case reviewed through the courts again. And at the end of all that, you’re lucky if they review your case at all. Many unconstitutional gun laws are allowed to stand without receiving any SCOTUS review.
One other critically important point: when a state or local government finally has their “law” overturned in appeals, they suffer no painful consequences for their deliberately unconstitutional overreach. They KEEP doing it because their state or city is not being required to pay HUGE penalties and compensation (millions of dollars) to the wrongly convicted or denied plaintiffs under their deliberately hostile “lawfare.” They suffer no painful consequences for their deliberate trampling of our rights, so there’s zero incentive to stop doing it. The individual citizens are experiencing all the pain and damages while the state pays no penalty for the unconstitutional harm they caused the plaintiffs and many others. The cycle will repeat until BOTH sides are feeling the pain. That isn’t happening under our current system.
I said plaintiffs above, but of course you can also be a defendant, if criminally charged with an unconstitutional gun law. In either case, the individual citizens are the only ones that suffer from this abusive “lawfare” being deliberately waged by democrats.
By the way, the abuse never ends. People are often charged by Soros-funded DAs and AGs for successfully using their legal gun in justifiable self-defense! Lawfare won’t stop until conservatives start imposing severe penalties against the obvious overreach of these communist tyrants. When we start bankrupting these democrats, they will finally fear us. From my own personal experience, I can say that Bullies are gonna bully, until you “break their bones” and humiliate them. Then it finally ends.