California is not known to gun lovers as a friendly state. Some might call it openly hostile to those who believe in the Second Amendment. But the state affiliate chapter of the NRA has made a bold move and filed a lawsuit against the state in an attempt to fully restore the freedoms afforded by Second Amendment.
The California Rifle and Pistol Association and the National Rifle Association filed the lawsuit on Monday. It challenges the state’s recently expanded “Assault Weapon Control Act” (AWCA) which makes it illegal to manufacture, sell, transport, import or transfer hundreds of popular and commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms inappropriately labeled “assault weapons.”
If the gun is semiautomatic with a bullet button and fires more than 10 rounds it is considered an “assault weapon.”
“It criminalizes possession of firearms which are commonly possessed for lawful purposes by law-abiding citizens for self- defense or shooting sports,” said Chuck Michel, a Long Beach attorney for the gun rights groups.
Gun control groups responded in predicable fashion, calling the burdensome law a way to keep guns out of the wrong hands.
“The Constitutional right to keep and bear arms does not mean that convicted felons, that other very dangerous people, have the same rights to carry deadly weapons in public that law-abiding Americans do,” said Adam Skaggs, litigation director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “And background checks are simply a very simple means of ensuring that guns and in California’s case, ammunition, don’t fall into dangerous hands.”
“They’re coming at gun ownership from every angle,” said Chuck Michel of the CRPA. “The whole PR campaigns to demonize gun owners. It’s all completely inappropriate and it’s part of an agenda that I think the Trump administration rejects.”
According to Michel, the CRPA plans to file at least five lawsuits to challenge the gun laws in California, with the next one seeking to upend the 10 round limit to magazines.
There’s no doubt the CRPA intends to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, which of course the gun-friendly Neil Gorsuch recently joined. And with more vacancies expected in the near future, the NRA hopes to face a very much pro-gun court.
Get your popcorn, folks, and pray for real change in California.
Well, Mr Skaggs is Wrong,
Felons and Disabled Rights to Guns.
It is a right of defense against that government, or any other person who might violate your rights to life, liberty, property, or the right to defend the above. By allowing criminals to be defined out of rights, no rights are secure, as it is the government… who defines crimes.
Citizenship is the right to have rights and not subject to good behavior of the citizen. (Trop v. Dulles). In 1866, the rights were extended to all persons in the United States under the 1866 Civil Rights act, and placed into the constitution, again for all persons, under the 14th amendment, and 1871 civil rights act. (Currently under title 28, section 1343 USC, title 18, sections 241-245 USC, title 42, sections 1981-1985 USC)
As a vested protected property interest, it is not subject to forfeiture by later congresses, without becoming a bill of attainder. It was not limited to the lawful citizen, even in the beginning.
All of our ‘founding fathers’ were traitors by definition, and subject to execution. Yet we now define ‘felonies’ as anything subject to more than a year in jail, even though the original definition required hard labor for infamous crimes, and even then, it was only capable of being accomplished by a writ of attainder. (Blackstone’s commentaries on the Laws of England)
The only means by which to make rights secure, was to secure them for all, and to punish the lawbreaker, by imprisonment or execution, not to deprive them of the rights that were common, and belonged to all citizens equally.
Under the 1871 civil rights act, it was recognized that the states would try to deprive rights under color of law by declaring felonies, and the punishment for those felonies (often involving curfews or other restrictions) was a deprivation of rights. It was made a felony act for a reason, and one of the rights involved was particularly mentioned in the Congressional record as the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, including against their own government…. for no other could engage in acts under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to deprive them of their rights. It included officers both federal and state, judicial and executive.
And was so rarely enforced it was near forgotten about. See McDonald v. Chicago, 2010.
To be quite frank, if they are citizens, they retain all the rights of citizenship. The citizenship is the rights, not the title. If they are not citizens, the governments have transgressed, as stripping citizenship for a crime is unconstitutional (trop v. Dulles) as an 8th amendment issue.
Further, stripping the rights from any person, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom in any state, territory, district, or possession, is a felony act, punishable up to and including life in prison, or the death penalty under title 18, section 242 of the US code.
The supreme court has already found that this code (under the 1866 civil rights act) was the reason for the establishment of the 14th amendment, and that the 1871 civil rights act reestablished it, and placed all states on notice. (McDonald v. Chicago) that the second amendment was fully enforceable against the states.
The objective of the act (Under Monroe v. Pape) was to prevent any group from depriving the rights of the minority, under any semblance of any law, regardless of color or other statuses.