A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down Maryland’s handgun licensing law, finding that its requirements, which include submitting fingerprints for a background check and taking a four-hour firearms safety course, are unconstitutionally restrictive.
In a 2-1 ruling, judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said they considered the case in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that “effected a sea change in Second Amendment law.”
The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2016 as a challenge to a Maryland law requiring people to obtain a special license before purchasing a handgun. The law, which was passed in 2013 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, laid out a series of necessary steps for would-be gun purchasers: completing four hours of safety training that includes firing one live round, submitting fingerprints and passing a background check, being 21 and residing in Maryland.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said he was disappointed in the circuit court’s ruling and will “continue to fight for this law.” He said his administration is reviewing the ruling and considering its options.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. No where dies it say militia members only.
See there you go. Missing half the dang Amendment.
You cannot argue an uninfringed right to personal ownership without also arguing that we need universal conscription and continuing training for all able bodied adults. And if you can’t fulfill that duty then you don’t get guns.
And the right is explicitly granted to the people, a well regulated militia is irrelevant to the existence of the right. Now you could argue the first phrase grants the right to conscription to the government I suppose, but no one is really making that argument. The right is explicitly given to the people, not people that are conscripted or subject to it, the constitution and amendments are very good about being explicit when they are limiting the scope of a power or right to a subgroup and that isn’t the case here.
The People. That’s not individually. It’s a group reference by definition. So if 100,000 people qualify for the well regulated militia then the right is fulfilled.
It certainly doesn’t confer an individual right to carry firearms 24/7 and use them on your fellow citizens. The reason it mentions a militia is because we didn’t have a standing army. The minute men were supposed to be our defense. But that doesn’t mean every person was armed every moment or even that everyone stored guns at home. In towns it was common to require storage in an armory because they understood why they were there and you’d generally have plenty of warning before Canadian troops reached your town.
The expansion of gun carry and ownership is nothing but ideology run amok, fueled by industry lobbyists.
Congress was given the power to raise armies, it’s also not true that militias were meant to fill that role. Again the right is not granted to militia members, it granted to the people, which means everyone. Do you believe only 100k people have the right to petition government, peacefully assembly, and be protected from warrantless search and seizure? You can’t just magically decide it means something different for arms.
Sure you can. Because there’s no similar qualifying statement in the first and fourth amendment. You keep trying to ignore everything but “the people” and the fact that’s a group reference, not an individual reference.
The entire “originalist” argument is based on bad faith revisionist history and semantics.