The battle for our right to keep and bear arms takes place in a lot of places. Sure, legislatures throughout the land witness the combat on a regular basis, with differing results, and many cities also play host to it.

But our courtrooms are also battlegrounds. It's where we fight the laws that were passed in spite of the Second Amendment.

Legal battles are expensive, and while there are laws restricting who can donate how much to elected officials, anyone can pick up the tab on a legal challenge.

Over at The Trace, they seem really put out by a former police officer who is doing just that in trying to overturn the Biden administration's overreach on so-called ghost guns.

By his own account, Dale Sutherland is an avid shapeshifter, assuming the role of drug kingpin, arms dealer, and mafia boss as he led elaborate undercover sting operations for the police in Washington, D.C., during a nearly 30-year career. As a young cop, Sutherland says, he even jabbed needles in his arm so that he could pass as an addict when making drug buys. Much of his most ambitious undercover work was aimed at getting guns off the streets.

On October 8, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could weaken the government’s ability to regulate home-produced, unserialized ghost guns, which are currently banned in D.C. Many in law enforcement consider such untraceable firearms a grave threat and have reported surges in the number of ghost guns used to commit crimes. Sutherland, who retired from the force in 2013, established a nonprofit five years ago that has funneled millions of dollars in anonymous cash to the law firm and gun rights groups that drove the ghost gun suit to the Supreme Court. 

“I don’t understand why he would do that,” retired D.C. Police Sergeant Gerald Neill, who once worked with Sutherland, said when told about his former colleague’s nonprofit. “From my point of view of the world, and probably Dale’s, we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

What's the problem with people having "ghost guns," anyway? I get being concerned about criminals, but why not specify them instead of just saying, "people" in a broader sense?

Regardless, the truth of the matter is that The Trace seems as if they're trying to discredit Sutherland, even going into his efforts to arrest black market dealers who were trafficking guns into DC.

Yes, because actually enforcing existing gun laws while opposing government overreach is so contradictory.

And yes, I rolled my eyes so hard while writing that I gave myself a migraine.

But rather than ask Sutherland why he would try to help pay for a legal challenge against regulatory overreach, they instead ask a completely different guy who then tries to speak for him.

“From my point of view of the world, and probably Dale’s," Neill said, "we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

Well, from my point of view of the world, and probably Dale's, the presence of so-called ghost guns isn't the issue and never has been. They account for something like two percent of the guns used in violent crime, at most. 

Maybe it's just me, but this feels scummy. The Trace calls itself a journalism project, but I'm not seeing a lot of journalism here. Just an attempt to somehow discredit a man who is making a stand they don't like.

Par for the course, I suppose.