Posts Tagged fourth circuit

The Fight Against Gun Bans Heats Up

From Bearing Arms:

This is one of four cases that the Supreme Court sent back to lower courts after issuing its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, and the only one of the four that deals with a ban on so-called assault weapons. The Fourth Circuit maintains that the state’s ban is perfectly in line with the Constitution because, in the court’s view, AR-15s and other semi-automatic long guns are “like” machine guns, and therefore aren’t protected by the Second Amendment.

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Maryland Gun Stores Challenge Law On Customers’ Behalf

From Reason:

So the Fourth Circuit held today in Maryland Shall Issue v. Hogan, in an opinion written by Judge Steven Agee and joined by Judges Barbara Keenan and Julius Richardson. The court cited Supreme Court cases that allowed alcohol stores to assert their prospective customers’ Equal Protection Clause rights in challenging sex-discriminatory drinking ages, and contraceptive sellers to assert their prospective customers’ substantive due process rights. The district court will now need to consider whether the Maryland law is consistent with the Second Amendment.

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Katie Couric Not Guilty Of Defamation

From Bearing Arms:

The Virginia Citizens Defense League brought the legal claim and asserted $13 million in damages after Under the Gun premiered at the Sundance Film Festival with a controversial scene. Couric asks members of the group, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?”What followed was nine seconds of silence, which the plaintiffs alleged amounted to “manipulated footage falsely inform[ing] viewers that the VCDL members had been stumped and had no basis for their position on background checks.”

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Upholding “Assault Weapon” Ban Could Backfire

From The Federalist:

The Supreme Court has refused to hear “assault weapon” cases in the past. However, previous cases were lower profile and the result of narrow readings, not the backwards interpretation exhibited in Kolbe. In its bravado, the Fourth Circuit may have crossed a bridge too far, sparking national debate and possibly forcing the issue to finally make it to the Supreme Court.

The Kolbe court justified their holding through a misplaced reliance on Heller’s discussion of weapons not protected by the Second Amendment: “dangerous and unusual weapons” and those “most useful in military service – M-16 rifles and the like.” This reliance was completely out of context, most obviously because the M-16 and its stablemates are machine guns, not in common lawful use by civilians anywhere. This is a far cry from the pedestrian semi-automatic weapons Maryland actually targeted.

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Court Says “Weapons of War” Not Covered Under Second Amendment

From The Trace:

Writing for the 10-4 majority, Judge Robert King of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said that the landmark Heller v. District of Columbia decision rendered in 2008 explicitly allows governments to regulate firearms similar in design and function to those issued to members of the military.

The decision marks the fifth time that a federal appeals court has upheld a state assault weapons law, but it goes further than those previous decisions. It is the first to exclude AR-15s and other similar guns from Second Amendment protection on the grounds that they are virtually indistinguishable from weapons of war. The court found that such designation overrides considerations of the common usage or suitability for home self-defense of a gun like the AR-15.

The judges in this case are choosing to be willfully ignorant of the weapons used at the time of the Constitution. There was no difference between arms used in the military/militia and those used for hunting or self defense. Townships had their own armories stocked with cannons (the equivalent of modern artillery). Their argument that the lethality of the weapons disqualifies the weapons is exactly what you would expect from elites in positions of power. They fear the power that the people would wield if allowed to keep and bear such weapons. On another point I would like to know how many of these judges have ever shot or held a gun, let alone own one.

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