Second Amendment groups launched a flurry of legal fights on Tuesday, filing suit against a decades-old prohibition on lawfully carrying inside post offices and a newly enacted law in Maryland that will ban the sale of Glocks and other striker-fired handguns.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed the gun ban bill on Tuesday, and minutes later NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford announced the organization's intent to sue.
"With a single stroke of his pen, Governor Wes Moore has banned one of the most popular handguns in America. Instead of going after criminals and enforcing existing laws, he has chosen to disarm law-abiding Marylanders and strip them of their constitutional rights. The NRA is filing an immediate legal challenge to this unconstitutional assault on the Second Amendment and will exhaust every option available to ensure this law is struck down."
That wasn't hype or hyperbole. The NRA, along with the Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition, have indeed sued the governor, along with Attorney General Anthony Brown and the acting superintendent of the Maryland State Police. The complaint is pretty straightforward: Maryland has banned commonly-owned firearms that are widely used for self-defense. The state's argument that Glocks and other striker-fired pistols can be illegally converted to fire full-auto is constitutionally irrelevant, because the switches themselves are prohibited under federal and state law.
That is a handgun ban. The fact that the ban targets only one category of popular handguns does not make it constitutional.
The Supreme Court took a handgun ban off the table in Heller almost 20 years ago. Anti-gunners are now trying to do an end run around that decision by going after certain categories of handguns. If Maryland successfully argues that Glocks can be banned because they can be illegally converted to fire full-auto, then it won't be long before the anti-gunners use a similar argument to target all semi-automatic firearms that can accept detachable magazines under the theory that they too can be easily and illegally modified to fire more than ten or fifteen rounds (or whatever arbitrary number a blue state has determined is "large capacity."
The Maryland case is one of two lawsuits filed by the NRA and partners on Tuesday. The other case involves the ban on lawful carrying in postal facilities, and the NRA is joined by Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation in suing the DOJ in federal court in Pennsylvania over enforcement of that provision.
“The United States” has previously “concede[d] that ‘there is no evidenceof firearms being prohibited at post offices … at the time of the founding.’” Indeed, until only recently, firearms carry was allowed at post offices—including in Pennsylvania. For example, in the early nineteenth century, travel writer Fortescue Cuming detailed “putting on my shot belt and taking my gun” on a walk to the “post office” in Harrisburg, where he mailed letters and discussed his travels with the postmaster. It was not until 1972—more than 330 years after the inception of America’s postal service and nearly 200 years after the Founding—that the federal government first banned firearms at post offices.
The complaint points out that the USPS and Congress passed rules and laws in the 18th and 19th century aimed at preventing or punishing robberies of postal carriers, but didn't take the step of banning lawful carry in postal facilities until the 1970s, long after the ratification of both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. The carry ban cannot be a "longstanding" national tradition, nor can it be seen as an attempt to deal with an "unprecedented" societal concern that didn't exist at the time of the Founding.
The complaint also notes that federal courts in Texas and Florida have found the carry ban unconstitutional. Because the Supreme Court has basically nixed the idea of lower courts imposing nationwide injunctions, however, those decisions were limited solely to those jurisdictions and the named plaintiffs in the lawsuits. If NRA and GOA are as successful in this court challenge, then the carry ban would be further weakened nationwide.
The DOJ dropped its appeal of the Florida decision when the case was pending in the Eleventh Circuit, and it's likely that the DOJ will decline to defend the carry ban in this new lawsuit as well. We'll be keeping an eye out for the DOJ's response, but this particular litigation could be resolved much faster than the lawsuit taking on Maryland's new ban on many commonly-owned handguns.
Editor’s Note: Pro-2A organizations across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
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