Posted on 07/19/2008 6:27:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Washington D.C. City Council has created so many hoops for handgun owners to jump through before they can exercise their Second Amendment rights, they may require legal counsel just to identify what the hoops are. This sorry state of affairs is much to the satisfaction of The Washington Post, which called for just such an obstructionist policy in an editorial.
At least one of those hoops is illegal, according to the Supreme Court, but a Post news story spun that fact as the opinion of “opponents of the handgun ban.” Is editorial policy coloring the news?
The Washington Post is no fan of the Supreme Court’s recently rendered Heller vs. D.C. decision. Last month when the nation’s highest court told Washington D.C. that its gun ban violated the Second Amendment of the Constitution, a Post editorial called the decision a “misguided ruling.” The Post opined that the District’s mayor and council would be on “solid moral and legal ground” if they re-crafted the District’s gun control laws to make them “as tough as possible” under the Supreme Court’s “puzzling mandate.”
Fast forward 21 days. The July 18 edition of the paper carried a story about the first day of gun registration in the District in which only one person applied for a license. That person was not Dick Heller, the man whose case went to the Supreme Court. In fact, Mr. Heller did show up to apply for his now legal license, but because he did not have his gun with him he could not register it.
According to the Post this misunderstanding didn’t irk Mr. Heller. What did irk Mr. Heller was the “strict storage requirements” mandated by the newly revised D.C. gun laws.
But Heller and von Breichenruchardt angrily criticized the city over other aspects of the handgun ownership and registration process, outlined in emergency legislation approved this week by the D.C. Council and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D).
The new law includes strict storage requirements that opponents of the handgun ban say violate the Supreme Court ruling. Gun owners must keep their pistols at home, unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks. Weapons can be loaded and used only if the owner reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger from an attacker in the home.
Note the spin. The Washington Post indicates that it is a matter of opinion whether the storage restrictions violate the high court’s ruling.
It’s not opinion. It’s fact. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, stated, “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”
It is clear that the D.C. restrictions requiring the gun to be “unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks” render the gun inoperable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.
Further, as reported by Jeff Johnson of One News Now.com (a former NRA employee) but not reported by the Post, the District’s requirement that every gun submitted for licensing be test-fired by police ballistics experts violates a congressional ban on federal agencies creating any kind of gun owner registry.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Heller case did leave room for municipalities and states to put reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. But it also made clear that excessive regulation would violate the Constitution. The Second Amendment-loathing folks as the Post need to set their anti-gun bias aside and report the facts as facts.
Why are leftists so intent on the disenfranchisement of citizens? Hoops and fees are equivalent of polls taxes and these laws are directed at blacks primarily.
We need a return to civil rights in DC.
The Gun Fairy is a private citizen and doesn’t need those things. I look for her at every gun show, but she’s always just out of sight.
Mayor Adrian Fenty and his ‘feisty’ attorney general, Peter Nickles are DC’s equivalent of Alabama Governor George Wallace standing in front of the school house door preventing court ordered desegregation.
Nice going, UA72.
It is worth the visit
She pokes her head out for public events and official court photos.
Plus, I wouldn’t put it past the libs to whack one of the originalists if Obama gets to name the replacement, which of course the pubbies will lack the spine to block. Shoot, they’d probably come out ahead if McPain named the replacement.
Unconstitutional rules are not law. Do not refer to them as such.
Federal statutes forbid interstate sales of handguns except via federally licensed dealer in the destination state, and places restrictions on interstate sales of other firearms. The statutes explicitly regard DC as a state for purposes of the prohibitions and restrictions.
Wait. I live in Texas. Federal law prohibits me from buying a handgun in Oklahoma?
Well, not buying it, but receiving it. If you buy it, they have to transfer it to an FFL in your state, rather than to you, and that guy has to make the transfer to you in accordance with your state laws as if you bought it from him.
Since the DofC comes under the jurisdiction of the Federal government, the attorney general can have the US Marshalls arrest the city council for conspiracy to violate civil rights of the people of Washington DC. The editors of the Post could be arrested for fomenting the conspiracy.
If you live in Texas, federal statute (do not use the term law when referring to unconstitutional statutes) forbids you from purchasing a handgun except (1) from or through a federally-licensed dealer in Texas, or (2) from a Texas resident who is not in the business of selling firearms.
I want a refund on my law school education. I did not know that.
The purpose of law school, IMHO, is to try to convince people that a 500-page proof that 2+2=5 is better than a 5-line proof that 2+2=4. The whole concept that one must understand precedent to understand the Constitution and laws is an intellectual fraud (albeit a well-entrenched one, alas).
I think a strong case could be made that the DC officials could not possibly have had a reasonable belief that their actions were lawful. The same could not be said of the Washington Post. A properly-instructed jury should acquit the Washington Post, or find them guilty of nothing more than a civil infraction, on that basis.
The notion that the staff of the Washington Post should be acquitted on the basis of jury protections that they themselves would seek to undermine is perhaps ironic, but laws which protect the good must also protect the bad.
Touché.;)
>The important thing to remember here is that Heller is now a civil rights case, with the D.C. government having, as per the D.C. Court of Appeals’ decision, to pay the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and costs. The courts are now vested with what amounts to a receivership over D.C.’s ability to promulgate and enforce any firearms regulations. To see how broad, continuing, and intrusive that court authority can be, all you need to do is look at what courts are regularly allowed to do and actually do in school integration cases.<
Don’t the DC city attorneys recognize this too? Why are they fiddling around trying to subvert the SCOTUS decision?
“The DC government is in a state of rebellion and that rebellion must be put down quickly. If not, then there’s no reason for any SCOTUS decision to be obeyed by anyone.”
...for that matter, there will not be any reason to obey any laws of the land and the Left will have lead us to chaos and anarchy.
If you were a Leftist kook, unfortunate enuf to have a horse's arse between your ears, you might also like to wear a toilet seat to hold your arse up during those long boring SC sessions, particularly when those stoopid conservative justices are irritating you to no end by speaking logic and truth.
They’re a bunch of pig heads, just like the old southern segregationists. Getting such mules’ attention requires repeated applications of a 2x4 between the eyes, swung rapidly.
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