The judicial nominees confirmed during Donald Trump’s stint in the Oval Office keep coming up big.
The latest rebuke of the Biden administration’s gun control plans comes after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seized on a legal argument advanced by Amy Coney Barrett from before she joined the Supreme Court bench.
Judicial interpretation of the law plays a critical role with court case precedent determining future rulings.
In 2008, the D.C. v. Heller ruling affirmed the Second Amendment as an individual right for law abiding citizens.
Of course, the gun control lobby raced to find every possible loophole to get their gun control plans around it.
But one of their biggest strategies for that just got rebuked by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In United States v. Zackery Rahimi, the Biden regime tried to argue effectively that it had the right to disarm any American citizen it considered dangerous.
The government tried to charge Rahimi with illegal firearms possession charges because of a domestic violence restraining order, claiming only “law abiding and responsible” citizens have Second Amendment rights.
The Court rejected that ploy in unanimous verdict.
“The question presented in this case is not whether prohibiting the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is a laudable policy goal. The question is whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), a specific statute that does so, is constitutional under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution,” the judges wrote.
“Considering the issue afresh, we conclude that Bruen requires us to re-evaluate our Second Amendment jurisprudence and that under Bruen, § 922(g)(8) fails to pass constitutional muster. We therefore reverse the district court’s ruling to the contrary and vacate Rahimi’s conviction,” the majority added.
This latest ruling follows the Breun decision last summer, which maintained any gun control measures need to line up with America’s historical protection of Second Amendment rights.
In coming to its decision the court cited a dissent written by Amy Coney Barrett back when she sat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals during the Barr v. Kanter.
Despite being on the losing side of that case, Barrett used her dissent to flesh out a “history and tradition” standard for the Second Amendment.
The argument she made there took hold in Bruen rejecting the idea that the government can simply ban all felons from owning firearms.
Barrett pointed out that when the government bans citizens from owning guns it leads to arbitrary dictates failing to meet an objective legal standard.
Barrett wrote:
In my view, the latter is the better way to approach the problem. It is one thing to say that certain weapons or activities fall outside the scope of the right. See District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 627 (2008) (explaining that “the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time’” (citation omitted)); Ezell v. City of Chicago, 846 F.3d 888, 892 (7th Cir. 2017) (Ezell II) (“[I]f … the challenged law regulates activity falling outside the scope of the right as originally understood, then ‘the regulated activity is categorically unprotected, and the law is not subject to further Second Amendment review.’” (citation omitted)); Ezell v. City of Chicago, 651 F.3d 684, 702 (7th Cir. 2011) (Ezell I) (drawing an analogy between categories of speech, like obscenity, that fall outside the First Amendment and activities that fall outside the Second Amendment). It is another thing to say that certain people fall outside the Amendment’s scope. Arms and activities would always be in or out. But a person could be in one day and out the next: the moment he was convicted of a violent crime or suffered the onset of mental illness, his rights would be stripped as a self-executing consequence of his new status. No state action would be required.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals pointed to this passage in flaying the Biden administration’s argument, saying it would ultimately grant government officials the ability to render the Second Amendment meaningless.
After all, if it could escape due process rights and take away guns from anyone the government simply deems dangerous, it would mean there is no limiting principle on gun control.
In that scenario the administration could argue that opposing Joe Biden makes citizens dangerous and ineligible to own firearms.
That scenario has looked increasingly likely to many Americans considering that Joe Biden already declared Trump supporters enemies of the republic and domestic terrorists looking to overthrow democracy.
Fortunately, this ruling casts doubt on much of the groundwork laid by Democrats and the gun control lobby to strip Americans – and specifically conservatives – of their Second Amendment rights simply by deeming them “dangerous” without due process.
Political Animal News will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
