Posted on 07/11/2011 5:03:38 AM PDT by marktwain
D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson released the text of his emergency legislation to make the District a federal firearms licensee, able to sell and transfer guns to citizens.
The resolution calls on Mayor Vince Gray to appoint an agency to act as the FFL for the city, which currently has none and therefore no way to legally transfer handguns into the city since proprietor Charles Sykes closed the sole gun shop in D.C. in April.
Federal and district laws require handguns crossing the D.C. border to be shipped to an FFL before the owner can take possession of them. But critics say Mendelson's new measure won't do anything to get D.C. out of a lawsuit that's about to get pricey, and won't do anything to change the strict zoning rules that are keeping Sykes from reopening in the first place.
"They need to come to terms with the fact that the Second Amendment applies to them," Alan Gura, the attorney who is bringing the new lawsuit against D.C., said.
Gura filed suit in federal court in May on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation and three D.C. residents who legally own handguns in other states but can't bring them into the city under current law. Right now the United States, Virginia and D.C. are all defendants, but Gura said that could change if D.C. would just drop its FFL rule.
"All they're doing by maintaining it is buying themselves a lawsuit -- I've told them this," Gura, who won the 2008 landmark Supreme Court case against the District forcing it to lift its handgun ban, said. "The D.C. government is playing games. ... This is going to wind up once again costing the taxpayers."
Sykes would appreciate it if the District redrew its zoning regulations. He said he has proposed several new addresses for his business to the District since being forced to relocate, and all of them have been rejected. He said the District was making it very difficult for any gun shops to open in the city.
"If I'm having a problem finding office space, and I've been in business since 1994, what do you think someone new is going through?" he said.
The D.C. council is expected to vote on the emergency measure at its last legislative meeting for the summer on Tuesday.
The DC Government does not fear a lawsuit.
If they lose the taxpayers pay it, the Federal Government gives tham a large part of their money and whoever wins the lawsuit will wait years before they see any benefit from it.
It’s a rogue government at best.
I used to love the nation's capital; back then it was the nation's capital. Today it's a nest of snakes, rats and cockroaches.
NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO FIRE ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER
Wayne LaPierre
Dear Fellow American:
I’ve just returned from the border between the United States and Mexico and I’ve never witnessed anything like the stinking, rotten level of murder, corruption, cover-up, and conspiracy confronting us today.
This conspiracy ignited two years ago when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that your Second Amendment rights are to blame for the drug crimes and killings in Mexico.
Holder and other top-level Obama Administration figures — even the President himself — claimed that 90% of the guns used by violent drug cartels were coming from American gun dealers.
In short, they blamed our Second Amendment rights for the violence of the Mexican drug cartels.
But leaked U.S. State Department cables have exposed this as a bald-faced LIE.
SIGN THE NATIONAL PETITION TO FIRE ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER HERE:
https://www.nra.org/fireholder/Petition.aspx
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