"Reasonable" may be the gun control lobby's most overused word. If it's not in first place, it's right behind "commonsense," and is used for the same purpose: to signal that, no matter how extreme a proposal actually is, only "unreasonable" people would dare oppose it.
A new working paper from Del Schlangen published by the University of Wyoming's Firearms Research Center does a fantastic job of demonstrating this premise. As Schlangen writes, over the past five years 11 states have adopted laws that require gun industry members to adopt "reasonable controls" over their products, without actually defining what "reasonable" means.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation challenged the vagueness of New York's law, but the Second Circuit rejected their argument and claimed that "reasonableness is a well-established legal standard.” That might be true, but as Schlangen's research indicates, use of the term 'reasonable' in the context of these laws aimed at gun makers, distributors, and sellers "does not describe fixed or knowable regulatory standards or categories." In other words, "reasonable" is whatever the gun control lobby and anti-gun politicians claim it is.
For decades, the leading gun control organizations have applied “reasonable” to restrictions from the most minor to the far extremes. For example, Giffords and its predecessors called a citywide handgun ban a “reasonable regulation under the police power, which includes the power in urban areas to prohibit classes of arms.” The Violence Policy Center similarly asserted that the handgun ban at issue in District of Columbia v. Heller was “a reasonable and constitutional restriction.” Giffords amicus briefs recite “reasonable choice to prohibit access to these dangerous instruments of mass mayhem,” applying the term to outright bans of tens of millions firearms and hundreds of millions of magazines. At the less severe end of the spectrum, the same groups call a ten-day waiting period “eminently reasonable", a training mandate “reasonable," and a longer background-check window a “more reasonable period of time."
Has a gun control group ever declared a gun control policy unreasonable? Not to my knowledge. No, it's only laws that safeguard our Second Amendment rights that might be deemed unreasonable by anti-gun activists, but even then their go-to description is "extreme," not "unreasonable."
Schlangen has catalogued 170 different instances of gun control organizations and supporters using the word "reasonable" to describe everything from a ban on handguns to "may issue" carry schemes to broadly defined "sensitive places" where lawful carry can be banned.
In doing so, he's seriously undercut the Second Circuit's conclusion that "reasonable" is an established legal standard that can be applied to firearm industry members in a way that they can understand and comply with.
Giving those businesses clear guidelines to follow would subvert the point of these laws. These "firearm responsibility" laws aren't designed to help companies in the firearms industry. They're put in place as a tool to attack their existence. If an FFL inadvertently participates in a straw purchase, they must not have implemented "reasonable" controls. If a gun store is the victim of a smash and grab burglary and firearms are stolen, they clearly didn't have "reasonable" measures in place to prevent that crime. If a gun buyer uses a firearm they lawfully purchased in a crime, or to take their own life, then that must be an indication that they didn't have "reasonable" measures to ensure that high-risk individuals would be blocked from making a purchase. None of those outcomes necessarily proves the dealer behaved irresponsibly. But under these laws, each could become evidence that the dealer's precautions weren't "reasonable" after all.
Under these laws, gun makers and distributors are supposed to have "reasonable" controls of their own on their products, but they're also not supposed to do business with FFLs lacking these undefined "reasonable" practices.
The Second Circuit panel that dismissed the NSSF's complaint overlooked the fact that New York could have explicitly spelled out what steps gun makers, distributors, and sellers need to take in order to establish those "reasonable" controls, but instead left it up to those industry members to figure it out on their own at great legal risk to themselves.
Would any other heavily regulated industry be expected to comply with a law that never explains what compliance requires? Of course not. But then, I'm not sure any other industry is as vilified by the Left as the firearms industry.
I wish that Schlangen had been able to compile this list before the Supreme Court denied cert to the NSSF's challenge of New York's law, but there are other lawsuits out there, and hopefully his work will help persuade the Court to take up the next case that gets to the justices. Striking down these laws is the reasonable thing for SCOTUS to do, because keeping them in place is just an invitation to sue the firearms industry into oblivion.
