We routinely say that gun laws only restrict the law-abiding. If I'm being honest, that doesn't mean every lawful gun owner. Plenty figure "better to be tried by 12 than carried by six," and not without cause. I mean, look at what happened in Bend, Oregon last week. The good guy with a gun had to break the law to save lives.
And sometimes, these people become the test cases that challenge gun control laws.
Yet that's risky. If you lose, you could lose your right to keep and bear arms, possibly forever.
That's why the latest request by the Firearms Policy Coalition is the height of rationality.
Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced today that it filed an opening brief and a petition for initial hearing en banc in its Wehr-Darroca v. District of Columbia appeal, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to overturn decades-old precedent that treats Second Amendment challenges differently from other constitutional cases and keeps peaceable gun owners out of court.
At issue is Washington, D.C.’s ban on firearm magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. Violating the ban is a felony punishable by up to three years in prison and a $12,500 fine, with a conviction potentially triggering a federal lifetime ban on possessing firearms. FPC and two of its members, William Wehr-Darroca and Gary Stemple, challenged the law because it prohibits them from possessing the standard magazines that came with their handguns. To avoid prosecution, the members were forced to leave those magazines outside the District and purchase restricted-capacity replacements.
But rather than hear their constitutional challenge, the federal district court dismissed the case under D.C. Circuit precedent requiring a heightened showing of a specific threat of prosecution. Under that rule, law-abiding gun owners who want to exercise their rights but refuse to risk criminal prosecution can be denied the opportunity to challenge the very laws threatening them.
“D.C. threatens peaceable gun owners with felony prosecution and years in prison for possessing standard firearm magazines, then hides behind a court-created rule to deny them their day in court,” said FPC President Brandon Combs. “That is a disgraceful constitutional Catch-22. The government does not get to tell Americans they must either surrender their rights or risk prison just to challenge an unconstitutional law. The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and gun owners are not second-class citizens. We're demanding that the D.C. Circuit end this absurd exception, open the courthouse doors, and let us fight D.C.'s immoral magazine ban on the merits. FPC and our Grassroots Army will Fight Forward until these unconstitutional bans are eliminated everywhere.”
And honestly, they're not asking for anything that shouldn't be rational on the face of things. If one is impeded from exercising their Second Amendment rights, then that should be more than enough standing for any court.
What the D.C. Circuit managed to do was engineer a way for it to toss challenges to gun control laws without having to worry about silly things like judicial precedent. The Supreme Court can rule as it wishes, and the D.C. Circuit Court essentially has no reason to worry about it because unless someone is facing a criminal conviction for violating a law, then they can just toss the case.
Calling it skeevy and chickens*** doesn't even begin to cover how I see this.
The easy answer here is for the court to simply listen to a completely rational ask by the FPC and set aside its previous precedent and put an end to this outright stupidity.
If not, I'm sure the FPC would love for the Supreme Court to get ahold of this nonsense, because it won't work out well for the D.C. court. In fact, by virtue of how this will play out, I wouldn't be shocked to see no justice side with the circuit court, if for no other reason than the precedent could be created and applied to other measures the liberal justices in other circuits.
This is dumb, but the court can fix it.
The court should fix it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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