Second Amendment cases likely to come up after SCOTUS seat confirmation
By Kerry Picket
Second Amendment-related cases are likely to come before the Supreme Court between this year and next after the new justice is sworn in, and cases that were previously rejected may get a second life.
President Trump is expected to name on Saturday his replacement for liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday. Ginsburg's decisions over her 27 years on the Supreme Court consistently backed regulations of guns and ammunition.
That's unlikely to be the case with the incoming justice, who Trump has said would be a woman.
After all, there's a right-to-carry case percolating in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Cam Edwards, editor of the Second Amendment news site Bearing Arms, told the Washington Examiner.
Edwards noted that also ripe for consideration by the Supreme Court is the federal ban on online and mail order ammo sales and the Young case out of Hawaii that deals with open carry.
Gun Owners of America, a gun-rights activist organization based out of Springfield, Virginia, is involved in several of these cases that could make their way up the judicial pipeline to the high court when there are nine justices again.
"We're sort of loosely involved in a [magazine ban] case in California. That's just been decided by three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It's been decided our way, holding that California has magazine ban [that] is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment,” GOA’s legislative counsel Jordan Stein told the Washington Examiner.
Stein also pointed out that GOA filed a case in the Western District of Michigan to declare that Trump's bump stock regulations were unconstitutional.
“First of all, that you can't, by administrative fiat, hold the bump stock is a machine gun, and that is now before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court rejected our petition to get a restraining order or an injunction on the implementation of the bump stock reg, but it's down there,” Stein explained.
He added, “It still could come up before the Supreme Court. We suspect that the reason that the Supreme Court denied our preliminary relief is that the pro-gun justices on the court didn't know how [Chief Justice] John Roberts was going to rule, and they might end up with a 5-4 ruling against the Second Amendment. But that's definitely coming up.”
Although Roberts sided with the conservative side of the court in the 2008 Second Amendment landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, where it was decided that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, additional Second Amendment-related cases thereafter were often rejected by the Supreme Court.
Back in June, five of the 10 cases the court rejected asked whether the Second Amendment enables the government to prohibit individuals from carrying a firearm outside their residence, except for those with a "good cause" or "justifiable need."
Two of the petitions for appeals were rejected, often by a 5-4 decision by the high court, including cases that challenged assault weapon bans in Illinois and Massachusetts. Justice Clarence Thomas criticized the court for routinely pushing away Second Amendment-related cases.
"If a lower court treated another right so cavalierly, I have little doubt that this court would intervene," Thomas, 71, wrote in a 2018 opinion. "The 2nd Amendment is a disfavored right in this court."
Original Here
 |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
OR
Click HERE to receive a Daily Newsletter delivered to your inbox each morning!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
-Tex