In addition to filing suit against the LA sheriff, [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet] Dhillon, in her DOJ role, has filed several briefs in support of gun rights groups seeking to strike down firearms restrictions. On September 22, a federal appeals court heard arguments in a challenge to an Illinois law that restricts the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The DOJ intervened, and Dhillon personally appeared in court to argue against the legislation.
“The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that the Second Amendment is not relegated to a second-class right,” she told the court, “and that all of the law-abiding citizens of this circuit remain able to enjoy the full exercise of their Second Amendment rights.” Dhillon chronicled her involvement on X, posting about her consuming preparation and noting that she was unwinding by making a needlepoint image of an eagle.
In May, she filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of challengers to a Hawaii law that restricts the carrying of guns on private property; the court will hear the case in January. Then in September, Dhillon filed a brief with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backing a challenge to New Jersey’s assault weapon and large-capacity magazine bans.
Until now, every appeals court to consider an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine challenge has upheld those laws, but judges in the Illinois and New Jersey cases have yet to rule. If the plaintiffs in either case prevail, it will increase the already-high likelihood that the Supreme Court will soon consider such bans, which could result in the prohibitions — one or both of which are in place in 14 Democratic-leaning states and the District of Columbia — being declared unconstitutional.
Still, gun rights groups have not been happy with all of the Trump DOJ’s moves on guns. In January, for instance, the 5th Circuit struck down a federal law that prohibits firearms dealers from selling handguns to those under 21. But the DOJ convinced a lower court to issue a narrow ruling applying only to the individual plaintiffs and members of the gun rights group behind the suit. The DOJ also urged the Supreme Court not to consider a separate challenge to the same law.
Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, said those moves are consistent with a broader pattern: Trump’s DOJ has been eager to challenge firearms restrictions in blue states, but quick to protect federal gun laws, particularly those that allow the government to prohibit certain classes of people — drug users and felons, for example — from owning guns.
“It seems as if they don’t want courts telling them whether these prohibitions are constitutional,” Willinger said of the DOJ, which is establishing a program that will allow some felons to have their gun rights restored. “They want to decide, as an executive branch matter, who is sufficiently reformed to get their guns back.”
Willinger said there’s an element of performance to the DOJ’s involvement in these cases — the agency clearly wants to be seen as crusading for gun rights. And he expects the DOJ to ally with gun rights groups in cases in which “it can most successfully characterize state or government actions as motivated by anti-gun animus.”
— Will Van Sant in At the Justice Department, Civil Rights Now Means Gun Rights
The gun control industry is the democratic party. The same party that fought a war to keep slavery. Fought an undeclared war to stop civil rights. Created the kkk. Put Americans in concentration camps because of their race. Suppressing civil rights is their whole thing.
The dems are a criminal terrorist .org and need to be treated as such.
The same party that keeps literally begging for an insurrection. The same party that s-e-x-u-a-l-l-y groomed a generation of kids, giving us troon/furry assassins and an endless supply of broken people.
Until the DoJ uses Confession of Error to state that US v. Miller was an illegal, rigged, show trial, I don’t beleive it.
I agree that US v. MILLER was a proceeding that didn’t comport with due process as we understand it today. However subsequent appellate courts and the press have misrepresented the holdings of the case. In pertinent part, the SCOTUSin MILLER held that:
“In the ABSCENCE OF EVIDENCE tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly IT IS NOT WITHIN JUDICIAL NOTICE THAT THIS WEAPON IS ANY PART OF THE ORDINARY MILITARY EQUIPMENT or that its use could contribute to the common defense. ” (emphasis added).
The SCOTUS remanded the case for further proceedings. However, Mr. Miller died before the case could be tried. Had it been tried, he could have introduced evidence that, in fact, short-barreled shotguns had a military purpose and was part of the ordinary military equipment. They were frequently used during WWI as “trench brooms” and even today they are ordinarily used by the military in urban combat scenarios.
Essentially, the MILLER court found that the 2nd gave citizens the right to own any weapons that would be part of the ordinary equipment in the military. My take on that is that would include machine guns, short barreled rifles, and other things the BATFE would crap their pants over.
What is egregious is how Scalia cast the findings of MILLER.
Scalia stated in HELLER:
“Read in isolation, Miller’s phrase “part of ordinary military equipment” could mean that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected. That would be a startling reading of the opinion, since it would mean that the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on machineguns (not challenged in Miller) might be unconstitutional, machineguns being useful in warfare in 1939. We think that Miller’s “ordinary military equipment” language must be read in tandem with what comes after: “[O]rdinarily when called for [militia] service [able-bodied] men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.” 307 U.S., at 179, 59 S.Ct. 816. The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms “in common use at the time” for lawful purposes like self-defense.”
He glued together two independent and unrelated clauses to import a meaning to MILLER that it never had because the SCOTUS didn’t like the conclusions that MILLER’s language lead to, namely, that machine guns and other militarily useful weapons are protected by the 2nd amendment. By reading into the 2nd amendment that the only arms that were protected were those “in common use at the time” for lawful purposes like self-defense, Scalia engaged in precisely the kind of judicial activism that we decry the left doing. He imported his policy preferences into the language of the Constitution.
So, ultimately, it was not MILLER that screwed the country over, but Scalia’s re-framing of MILLER. Why did he do it? I don’t know, but I suspect he did it to appease other justices to get the necessary votes for a decision.
I’m getting what I voted for. This is far superior to what the libertarian Gary Johnson offered if he became president.
But only the congress can pass legislation that makes the executive branch changes permanent.
It is long past the time that people should expect the courts, including and especially the Supreme Court, to protect us.
Few courts have done anything positive about Second Amendment rights. Even the so-called Bruen decision from the Supremes did next to nothing since almost every court that has gone anywhere near it since its issue has ignored it.
The excruciatingly unconstitutional Illinois PICA wide-angle gun and magazine ban was an easy pick for rights restoration. But the Supreme Court has kept itself miles away. I recall an instructor colleague declaring confindently when the PICA was signed into law that it would quickly be struck down.
Years later, and the courts have not even come close to disabusing Illinoisans of its ridiculous overreach.
I guess the wording of the 2nd Amendment don’t mean skat in most of the country.