The U.S. Virgin Islands are one of those territories where I'd really like to visit. I mean, no passport, American dollars, and tropical weather. What's not to love?
Well, their insane gun laws, for one...including one that didn't exist.
We've written about their actual laws aplenty, but it seems that there's a new wrinkle in the Department of Justice's lawsuit against the territorial government.
In particular, the DOJ alleges that officials there overstepped their authority on gun control, and not quite in the same manner as every anti-gun state does.
The original complaint focused heavily on the firearm-licensing process. Federal attorneys alleged that VIPD subjected applicants to lengthy delays, required the installation of gun safes, conditioned applications on home inspections and continued requiring applicants to establish a special reason for carrying a firearm even after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
The Sept. 2 amended filing goes considerably further.
DOJ says it recently learned that the alleged misconduct “goes back literally decades to at least 2004.” According to the complaint, VIPD acknowledged on Aug. 13 that for decades it had enforced firearm and magazine-capacity restrictions contained in the federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 even after that federal statute expired.
The federal ban was enacted for 10 years and expired on Sept. 13, 2004. It had restricted certain semiautomatic firearms and ammunition-feeding devices capable of holding more than 10 rounds, subject to exceptions.
DOJ alleges that after the federal law expired, VIPD nevertheless continued restricting what kinds of firearms Virgin Islanders could possess even though those restrictions were no longer contained in federal law and, according to the United States, had no basis in territorial statute.
In other words, they enforced a law that didn't exist in any way, shape, or form within their jurisdiction.
The technical term for this is "bat-guano insane."
No, seriously, look it up.
An assault weapon ban is bad enough, but that will hopefully be put to bed soon enough. The problem here is that the DOJ says the VI government was enforcing the federal assault weapon ban after it was sunsetted. And, it seems, they got away with it for more than 20 years. No one said a thing about it at the federal level until just now, in a filing that happened on my birthday.
And boy, what a present, let me tell you.
I'm literally sitting here, speechless about this. My wife can tell you that's a state of affairs that doesn't happen often — or often enough for her tastes, at least.
They enforced a law that technically didn't exist. It sunset, and rather than just pass their own, they went, "Nah. We like it being a fed thing, so we'll just keep pretending that no one knows it's no longer a thing."
How?
How do you actually do this?
I can see both malice and incompetence, and while I generally argue not to attribute things to malice that can easily be ascribed to incompetence, this is a prime example of the counterpoint that, at a certain point, the difference is irrelevant.
Then we have this, which baffles me.
The filing does not specify how many firearm-license applicants or gun owners were affected by those historical practices, nor does it identify individual enforcement actions stemming from each alleged restriction.
It's not that they didn't include it in the filing, but that there are people who have been running around for 22 years who were impacted by a non-existent law, and we're not hearing about them every freaking day.
Honestly, this is one of those cases where hanging sounds almost too good for whoever is responsible for this.
It wasn't enough to violate people's Second Amendment rights, but apparently, they violated a whole lot more in their anti-gun zealotry. I don't care where you fall on the gun spectrum; that should be construed as nothing but evil.
