Bloomberg’s publishing arm has been on a tear recently to try to frame the gun issue from Bloomberg’s point of view, and make the NRA look bad. This article doesn’t quite work, as the six comments so far in support of NRA would seem to indicate. I think most people get that you can’t have a patchwork of laws on a topic where violations are typically felonies or high-level misdemeanors. Most cities, including Philadelphia, actually can’t make more than petty crimes by ordinance according to state law, but cities in other states often have much greater leeway for making serious crimes. The ability to preserve that is part of why Bloomberg is making this a big deal.
7 thoughts on “Fighting for Preemption”
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With the latest shooting in NYC Doomburg will be on a tear and if the gun used was purchased out of state he will be screaming. He is so quick to track where the guns came from, so how come he is not tracking where the criminals came from? Bet 99.8% are from NYC and he doesn’t want to deal with that.
gun-controls last stand
At the national level they are beaten. In the vast majority of States they are also beaten. So now they have fallen back to the last zones of populace which they still have some control over, the large cities which have concentrated levels of blue voters.
Even in the short run, it’s a losing strategy. The real danger to the gun-control policies of liberal mayors isn’t so much State preemption, as it is Federal litigation based on the 14th Amendment.
Preemption of cities doesn’t help much in a blue State like California, because the State laws are already so terrible and are unlikely to change through legislation. And even without preemption, I doubt a large city could get away with much gun-control in a red State like Texas. So preemption probably is only important in purple States like Pennsylvania.
California’s preemption law prevented San Francisco from banning all firearms twice, with an extra strep to confiscate and destroy all handguns without compensation (1982 and 2005). No matter how bad state laws are, cities can go worse.
It’s actually important in NJ. The state has pre-empted firearms regulation, and the NJ2AS is using that pre-emption to sue townships who add additional requirements to the already onerous permitting process, with a fair amount of success so far.
They ought to go after the State regulations. You kill a snake by removing the head, not picking off scales…….
That’s being done as well. There is a suit in the federal court system challenging the “justifiable need” clause for carry permit issuance, very similar to the one in MD. NJ’s system of firearms regulation wasn’t built in a day; some of it fits back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Given that the NJ Supreme Court largely nullified by fiat a thirty day deadline in the law for the “shall-issue” purchaser’s permit, we have to be careful when working in NJ courts.
This. Fighting gun control in the courts is like eating an elephant: it can only be done one bite at a time.
If you try to do it all at once, the courts will not want to set such a sweeping precident, and you will fail. That’s why groups like the Second Amendment Foundation are taking such seemingly small steps — each one builds upon the next, and the cumulative effect is that we get what we want from the courts in the end.