Posted on 12/07/2013 10:13:06 PM PST by marktwain
CHARLESTON — Attorney General Patrick Morrisey today announced that West Virginia and 25 other states and one territory have filed an amicus, or friend of the court, brief with the U.S. Supreme Court opposing a federal government attempt to prosecute legal gun owners who wish to sell a weapon to another person who can legally own and purchase firearms.
“Our Office is proud to lead a bipartisan group of 27 states and territories in this brief to oppose the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to unilaterally create a federal restriction on firearm sales between law-abiding citizens,” Attorney General Morrisey said. “We believe that every legal gun owner in this state and nation should be interested in the outcome of this case.”
The case, Abramski v. United States of America, challenges whether federal law prohibits citizens who legally buy a firearm from a licensed dealer with the intention of then selling that gun to another private citizen who also may legally own and purchase firearms. The Obama administration argues that the citizen who buys and then sells the gun is acting as a “straw purchaser,” which they claim is illegal under several federal statutes.
The States, however, argue that Congress has never passed a federal law that prohibits such purchases. At most, the laws relied on by the United States prohibit private citizens from selling guns to people who are prohibited from owning firearms, such as minors, convicted felons, or people who have been diagnosed as having mental illnesses. It is up to the States and their citizens to decide whether to implement additional regulations on private gun sales.
West Virginia is joined in this brief by attorneys general representing Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming.
“This case is important to West Virginia citizens who wish to practice their Second Amendment rights and sell firearms to other legal West Virginia gun owners,” Morrisey said. “The State of West Virginia does not discourage private gun sales, but the Department of Justice wants to ensnare innocent West Virginian gun owners in a web of criminal laws if they try to sell their guns. This federal overreach is a blatant attempt to overstep state regulations and Congress in order to steer more gun sales to federally licensed dealers, who then make federal records of every transaction.”
The states’ amicus brief is in support of a former Roanoke, Va., police officer, Bruce Abramski, who purchased a gun in 2009 using a law enforcement discount and sold it to his elderly uncle, who lived in Pennsylvania. Both Abramski and his uncle could legally own firearms and made the transaction in accordance with Pennsylvania gun laws, including a background check of the purchaser. However, federal authorities prosecuted Abramski on the grounds that he made false statements on the gun purchase form.
In January 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Abramski’s conviction, saying that such “straw purchases” are illegal under federal law. In October, the Supreme Court agreed to review the conviction.
“Our Office is very concerned about the federal government’s targeting of law-abiding gun buyers,” Morrisey said. “The federal government is attempting to circumvent Congress and set aside state regulations that don’t prevent private gun sales, and instead make sure there is a federal record of every gun bought or sold in the United States. While no one wants guns to end up in the hands of a potential or real criminal, the administration’s interpretation oversteps the law and could make criminals out of innocent citizens.”
Oral arguments are scheduled for Jan. 22, 2014, with a decision to come by the end of the court’s session in June.
“Nice to see some states coming up to the plate.”
Indeed.
This is in addition to the FACT that the fed gov has never been given the legal power or ability to legally regulate any type of “gun”. Not only from proscription of the 2nd Amendment, but the Constitution gives the fed gov no powers to do anything like it. Unfortunately, the fed gov has total disregard for the “chains” of the Constitution that were enacted expressly to hold down the gov’t., not the citizens.
Now if WV can get rid of that RAT Senator Joe Manchin, real progress can be made. Manchin “supports gun rights” but votes for Communism. You just can’t have both. All RATS must go. And RINOS too. :)
Facts of case itself looks unusual and includes an alleged “terrorist threat”, bank robbery, and of course this firearms violation.
Here is a comment from a local investigative reporter and a link to the whole background.
“On the other hand, this may be one of those cases in which law enforcement “is sure” a suspect committed a crime, but they don’t have enough evidence to prove it — or even charge him with it.
As a journalist I have some experience with those cases. And they’re usually the ones that are most troubling. Especially when law enforcement is going to great lengths to keep a man locked up — like they have done with Abramski.
I don’t know if he’s guilty or not. But the case against him seems to be getting weaker and weaker, and it sure seems like he’s getting the shaft.”
Exactly! I always bring this up whenever someone starts babbling about "well regulated militia". The plain fact is that it doesn't really matter what the 2nd Amendment says.
Naturally, when confronted by this the gun-grabbers tend to fall back on the Magical Super-elastic interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, at which point I say "...oh, so according to you the federal government DOES have the authority to regulate...abortions...right?"
Obama and Bloomberg Use December 14 to Promote Gun Control
Posted on December 5, 2013
NRA-ILA GRASSROOTS ALERT: Vol. 20, No. 47 12/06/2013
Google “Organizing for Action” (OFA), supposedly a non-partisan, grassroots group, and you get www.barackobama.com. Likewise, click on the preceding link, and it takes you to the Organizing for Action website. Despite OFA’s innocuous-sounding name, the Chicago-based group is an arm of the Obama political machine, the successor to a similar Obama store-front put together after his 2008 election, Organizing for America. Whatever the group’s name happens to be at a given moment, fulfilling the president’s goal of “fundamentally transforming America” remains its mission.
On Monday, Obama’s current operation sent an email to supporters urging them to hold events advocating gun control on December 14, the one-year anniversary of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg’s euphemistically-named group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, along with Moms Demand Action, are releasing a 60-second version and a 30-second version of a TV ad portraying a person approaching an elementary school with a duffel bag, as students observe a moment of silence for the victims who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary. The obvious implication is that the gun control laws that one or both groups support could prevent the type of crime committed at Sandy Hook.
Concurrently, Vice-President Joe Biden sent an email encouraging organizers of the OFA events to center them on support for a “universal background checks” law that would prohibit private sales of firearms without a background check and for increasing penalties for illegal gun trafficking.
Dovetailing with the Bloomberg ads, Biden implied that imposing “universal checks” and increasing trafficking penalties would prevent terrible crimes like those committed at Sandy Hook; in the Aurora, Colorado, theater; in the Sikh temple in Oak Park, Wisconsin; and at Virginia Tech University.
Like so much of what underlies the gun prohibition movement, the premise behind Bloomberg’s ad and Biden’s message is simply not true. In each of the crimes the gun control supporters point to, the guns involved were bought legally, from a firearm dealer, with a background check. No trafficking was involved. And the guns used in the Sandy Hook murders were stolen from their lawful owner, who was also murdered by the perpetrator.
Obama and Biden are additionally claiming that Obama’s 23 executive actions, announced earlier this year, have helped “make sure our families and communities are safe.” But there’s no evidence to support that claim. Furthermore, even before the “actions” were announced, America’s murder rate had fallen to lower than any time since 1963, and its total violent crime rate had fallen to lower than any time since 1970.
Obama and Bloomberg are pulling out the stops, knowing that support for gun control—which rose in the days after Sandy Hook—is waning. Not only was the Obama gun control agenda defeated in the Senate last spring, a new CNN poll shows that support for gun control has dropped by six points since January, and a majority of Americans now oppose stricter gun laws.
For proponents of the Second Amendment, things are moving in the right direction. Yet the president, with the assistance of America’s most meddlesome billionaire, remains determined to push his gun control agenda and will exploit any occasion, no matter how crassly, to promote it. It’s going to be a long three years that will require your eternal vigilance and increased activism as we work to make Americans safer by ensuring enforcement of gun laws, by reforming our mental health system, by working to prevent the inevitable assaults on our liberty, and by electing pro-Second Amendment lawmakers to office in next year’s elections.
In the deep blue state of Delaware, the Rat legislators passed a law that said just what Holder is trying to push and now all firearms sales , with very few exceptions, have to go through a FFL dealer. WalMart stopped selling guns here because they didn’t want to have people dragging guns through the store to get the paperwork done in their sports section.
We all feel so much safer now /sarc.
To which they're naturally going to be inclined to respond "Oh, so we've found the area where you actually believe in federal power!", but that's not true, because the feds didn't really regulate abortion pre-Roe. It was at Roe that they became more involved by throwing out state laws. Besides, it's not analogous anyway, one case involves when it's legal to kill other people, the others do not.
I think the Gov’t probably does have the power to regulate guns in a limited sense. That would be setting standards for proof testing and the like for any weapon, private or militia.
They could probably also set standards for militia issue weapons; that is to say define a standard militia rifle, ammo and so on. Also in the context of militia training and usage only, they could set rules and regulations.
Otherwise I agree with your point.
c.w.
Not this election but we will certainly get rid of Rockefeller. We love the attorney general
WV must realize that Obama hates coal. Good riddance to commie Jay! Maybe WV can now move into the RED column—we need ya!!
Oh they know he hates coal. That’s why in the last election some incarcerated felon from the state of Texas got 42% of Obama’s vote
I lost you there—who is the felon from Texas?
1 in 3 West Virginia Democratic primary voters choose felon over Obama
I’d sure LOVE to have you show me the part of the US Constitution which gives the federal gov’t that power. I’m not talking rules, regulations, state laws, etc. I’m talking about the explicit power designated to the Federal Government to do such things. In the actual words of the Constitution. ‘Cuz if it ain’t there, it ain’t anywhere.
The US Constitution was written to give the Federal Gov. only certain specified powers. All the rest are kept at the state level or retained by “the people”.
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”
—Thomas Jefferson
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce.”
—James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 45
“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”
—Edmund A. Opitz
Again, show me the words. State’s may have that power, but I find nothing within the four corners of the Constitution giving the Federal Gov’t. those powers.
I could be wrong.......... NAW!
While most State militias would want federal army standard issue ammo, etc. to take advantage of prices and uniformity, I'd still leave that to the States.
The only Federal intervention should be in inherent safety (for the user) of the firearm, if then, and that would come under standards testing.
That’s funny a hell. Thanks for brightening my day!
The pleasure was mine ;)
This is just step one. Step two will be interstate sales. Good, very good.
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