As Second Amendment supporters, we find ourselves disappointed quite a bit. We elect people who claim to be pro-gun, only to find out that they are anti-gun control at best. There's a difference between those two positions, and it matters, especially if we want to get our rights back as we deserve.
The Trump administration is a prime example. We expected much of President Donald Trump this go-around, but what we got was a DOJ that continues to defend gun control laws.
Yeah, they're better than any other administration in my lifetime, but the bar was so low that an amoeba couldn't limbo under it.
One consistent bright spot has been Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the Civil Rights Division. She's been aggressive about taking on state and local gun control laws, and now the state of Colorado has earned the legal Bat Signal's attention.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told Newsmax on Tuesday the Trump administration is targeting state and local gun restrictions with a series of lawsuits it hopes will lead to a Supreme Court fight over the Second Amendment.
Appearing on "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE," Dhillon pointed to the Justice Department's lawsuits this month against Denver and the state of Colorado — filed a day apart over Denver's AR-15-style rifle ban and Colorado's limit on magazines holding more than 15 rounds — as the start of an effort to challenge gun laws jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Both complaints landed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado and invoke the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Dhillon argued that both jurisdictions hide broad bans behind semantics.
"In the case of Denver, they have this ... fake term called 'assault weapons,' and they use that to slant the public against a most commonly owned rifle in the United States. For example, the AR-15 is banned by this unlawful restriction," she said.
The filing against Colorado, she added, attacked "similar use of semantics, saying that they're banning large capacity magazines."
The Colorado law, she said, sweeps in standard equipment.
"The large-capacity magazines in question are actually the standard-issue magazines for many of these firearms," Dhillon said, contending a 15-round cap renders much of the country's most popular hardware unusable.
Of course, this is absolutely nothing new. This is how anti-gunners have always done things. If they can't outright ban them, they play these silly games with definitions and semantics, all to make something that's blatantly unconstitutional look like just some harmless regulation.
But it's never harmless.
Every single restriction creates difficulties for the law-abiding, all while the criminals simply go about doing as they've always done. It's almost the way of the world.
Dhillon, however, is clearly not someone who is willing to play along with the little games. She sees the injustice and goes after it, which is what the Civil Rights Division is supposed to do. It's what they should have been doing all along. While there are other civil rights besides the right to keep and bear arms, Dhillon's predecessors seemed to act as if there were only nine amendments in the Bill of Rights.
This is sure as hell what I voted for.
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