Dear Friends,
Last week, I led 28 other states in an amicus brief in support of a writ of certiorari urging SCOTUS to directly take up Maryland’s gun ban law. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, ignoring major Supreme Court precedent, upheld Maryland’s unconstitutional law by holding that the most popular rifle in America is not an “arm” within the scope of the Second Amendment.
Maryland’s law broadly bans hundreds of firearms in common use and under legal ownership. The Fourth Circuit ruled that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are NOT protected by the Second Amendment – because those semi-automatic arms are best suited for the military and therefore not protected for citizens. This, despite the fact the U.S. military does not use, nor has it adopted, the AR-15 for issue. Because an AR-15 looks like it COULD be military or shares cosmetic similarities with existing military arms, it should apparently be banned. Appearance over substance is not a standard for good governance.
Our submitted brief argues, “…there is no principled distinction between weapons that are ‘for military use’ and weapons that are ‘for private use.’ By pretending otherwise, the Fourth Circuit authorizes itself to ignore the Second Amendment whenever it thinks a weapon looks too much like a soldier’s. And this leaves citizens, businesses, and regulators guessing as to what supposedly makes an arm ‘most useful in military service’ – after all the Fourth Circuit said that even weapons with only semi-automatic capabilities may be considered best suited for military…even if the military does not actually use such weapons.”
The Fourth Circuit’s ruling ignores a myriad of case law on the Second Amendment. The judges turned a blind eye to the recent SCOTUS rulings of Heller and Bruen and other cases that establish clear individual ownership rights and the necessity of historical precedent, and that a ban cannot not be applied to firearms in common usage. Last I checked, the AR-15 was the most common, modern semi-automatic sporting rifle in America. Tens of millions of citizens own and use these rifles legally for hunting, shooting, self-protection, and civil defense. This is a textbook definition of a firearm protected by the Second Amendment from capricious government overreach.
This isn’t the only case I’ve led in the nationwide defense of the Second Amendment. We have joined multiple cases in California and Illinois to overturn gun and magazine bans. We’ve joined the VanDerStok case to overturn rulings on so-called “ghost guns.” And most importantly, we helped overturn the Chevron Deference doctrine at SCOTUS earlier this year, which drove so many of the bad policy decisions and rules coming from the Biden-Harris Administration agencies which unconstitutionally bypass congressional authority.
There is no historical precedent where an authoritarian government has ever banned firearms for the safety of their citizens, despite what they claim. Authoritarian governments ban firearms for their own safety and preservation of power, pure and simple. History is filled with examples, including the “shot heard ’round the world” from our own American Revolution, as British troops marched out from Boston to seize arms and gunpowder stores, suspecting those arms could be used against them in rebellion to their imposed absolutism. Our minutemen felt differently.
Take encouragement that Idaho and 26 other state attorneys general (and the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Arizona) supported our efforts for SCOTUS to overturn Maryland’s gun ban. While we have strong support for our gun rights in Idaho, many of our fellow citizens in America do not enjoy similar protections, nor have state leaders that will stand up against such attacks. We signers of this brief to SCOTUS know that a threat to freedom in one state is a threat to freedom everywhere.
