gunrights
Last month, a federal judge ruled that New Jersey's ban on AR-15 rifles is unconstitutional. A week later, a federal appeals court deemed a similar ban in Maryland perfectly consistent with the Second Amendment. These dueling decisions reflect a basic disagreement about whether the Second Amendment allows the government to ban guns that are commonly used for lawful purposes, as opposed to "dangerous and unusual weapons." The answer seems clear based on the Supreme Court's precedents. The Court's landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned a local handgun ban, not...
Reason
"A lot of people are upset that I said I'm going to be writing in Ron Paul for president of the United States, and that is true. I will be writing in Ron Paul." So said Kyle Rittenhouse in a recent video posted to X. A lot of people, it appears, are indeed upset. Should they be? Rittenhouse catapulted to national attention in 2020 when, at age 17, he armed himself, traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a night of riots and civil unrest, and shot three men, killing two. It was always Rittenhouse's contention that he'd acted in self-defense, and his arrest galvanized many in the conservative mo...
Reason
This week, a federal judge ruled that a major provision of New Jersey's "assault weapon" ban is unconstitutional, but he was not happy about saying so. The decision illustrates how the Supreme Court's Second Amendment precedents have constrained the discretion of judges who are personally inclined to support gun control. New Jersey's Assault Firearms Law—which the state Legislature approved in 1990, responding to a mass shooting at a Stockton, California, elementary school the previous year—bans a list of specific rifle models, along with "any firearm manufactured under any designation which i...
Reason
Talk about your thin-skinned politicians! Apparently, it doesn't take much more than an insult from critics these days to get the governor of Maine to scream for the police. Since When Is Criticism a Crime?Back in December, during an interview with a local NBC affiliate about blunders by official in the lead-up to the Lewiston mass shooting, Maine Gov. Janet Mills left the door open to tighter gun restrictions, including a ban on so-called "assault weapons." That segment was picked up and publicized by The Maine Wire, a conservative-leaning news site. That outlet's post, in turn, drew a pungen...
Reason
When the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the federal law that disarms people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders last month, its ruling was narrow. "Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the Government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in United States v. Rahimi, which overturned a 2023 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The justices left for another day the question of whether the Second Amendment allows the government to disarm people w...
Reason
The 2016 Republican Party platform, which condemned Democrats for proposing laws that would "eviscerate the Second Amendment," devoted three paragraphs to gun rights. The 2020 platform did not discuss the subject at all because there was no 2020 platform; the party instead promised to "enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda." This time around, the Republican National Committee (RNC) did approve a platform. But as The Reload's Jake Fogleman notes, the RNC has excised any mention of the Second Amendment except for a passing reference. That reference appears in a list of "t...
Reason
Two years ago, New York Times columnist David French complains, the Supreme Court "created a jurisprudential mess that scrambled American gun laws" by saying they must be "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." Last week, French suggests, the Court drew back from the precipice when it upheld a federal law that disarms people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders. That take is somewhat misleading, since all eight justices who voted to uphold that law plausibly claimed to be following the approach that the Court prescribed in the 2022 case Ne...
Reason
A federal law that Congress enacted in 1994 prohibits gun possession by people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. Since that seems like a no-brainer, many people were dismayed when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit deemed that provision unconstitutional last year in United States v. Rahimi. But as anyone who reads the majority and concurring opinions in that case can see, there is a striking problem with 18 USC 922(g)(8): It disarms people even when there is little or no evidence that they pose a danger to others. In an 8–1 decision today, the Supreme Court avoided th...
Reason
Agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) suspected that Bryan Malinowski, executive director of the airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, and an avid firearms collector, was reselling enough firearms at gun shows to make him more of a commercial dealer than a hobbyist. That meant he should, in the ATF's view, get a Federal Firearms License. So on March 19, agents did what law enforcers do when they suspect people of paperwork violations: They raided his home before dawn, taped over the doorbell camera, and shot Malinowski dead less than a minute later when he o...
Reason
After the Supreme Court overturned the Trump administration's bump stock ban last week, critics complained that the justices had interpreted the Second Amendment in a way that rules out perfectly reasonable gun regulations. That was an odd complaint, because the case did not involve the Second Amendment. The Court's decision upheld an important principle that goes far beyond gun control: Federal bureaucrats do not have the authority to invent new crimes by rewriting the law. All Americans, regardless of how they feel about gun rights, have a stake in that principle, which is crucial to the rul...
Reason
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