{"id":100728,"date":"2024-03-15T14:02:28","date_gmt":"2024-03-15T19:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=100728"},"modified":"2024-03-15T14:02:28","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T19:02:28","slug":"100728","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=100728","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Appeals Court Ruling Poses Danger of Confiscation of All Firearms<\/a><\/p>\n

An Obama-appointed judge in Rhode Island\u00a0authored an exceedingly dangerous opinion last week<\/a>, rejecting arguments that the state\u2019s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds was unconstitutional. Instead, Judge William Kayatta, a graduate of Harvard Law School, built the case cleverly, declaring that LCMs (large capacity magazines) weren\u2019t protected under the Second Amendment and, by implication, neither are the firearms they feed.<\/p>\n

At issue was the law passed in 2022 \u2014\u00a0HB 6614<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 banning the possession of LCMs, with violations being declared a felony and violators facing five years in jail upon conviction. In other words, law-abiding citizens would lose not only their firearms, but their freedoms as well.<\/p>\n

Lawsuits brought by pro-Second Amendment advocates were rejected at the district level and, when appealed, the lower court\u2019s decision was affirmed. But Judge Kayatta went further \u2014 much further \u2014 to build a case that anti-gunners around the country will likely seek to emulate.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs, Ocean State Tactical, doing business in the state as Bear Hunting and Fishing Supply, and four individual gun owners, complained that Rhode Island\u2019s law violated their Second Amendment rights, the Fifth Amendment\u2019s Takings Clause, and the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s Due Process Clause.<\/p>\n

In reviewing and affirming the lower court\u2019s decision denying their complaints, Kayatta wrote that the plaintiffs \u201cfailed to prove that LCMs are \u2018Arms\u2019 within the meaning of the Second Amendment,\u201d that the Takings Clause in the Fifth Amendment (\u201cNo person shall be \u2026 deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation\u201d) was not violated by the state law, and that it further \u201cposed no problems under the Fourteenth Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were several pieces of the puzzle Kayatta put together to avoid the demands of\u00a0Bruen<\/em>, namely that the state had to provide historical analogues to the infringements in order for them to stand.<\/p>\n

Instead,<\/p>\n

Given the lack of evidence that LCMs are used in self-defense, it reasonably follows that banning them imposes no meaningful burden on the ability of Rhode Island\u2019s residents to defend themselves.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After discussing the history of states restricting possession of sawed-off shotguns and Bowie knives, he wrote:<\/p>\n

In each instance, it seems reasonably clear that our historical tradition of regulating arms used for self-defense has tolerated burdens on the right that are certainly no less than the (at most) negligible burden of having to use more than one magazine to fire more than ten shots.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then used what he called an \u201capt analogy\u201d to support the state\u2019s ban: rules on the private accumulation of gun powder. Without mentioning the fact that those state rules were driven by concerns over accidental fires, he wrote:<\/p>\n

Founding-era society faced no risk that one person with a gun could, in minutes, murder several dozen individuals. But founding-era communities did face risks posed by the aggregation of large quantities of gunpowder, which could kill many people at once if ignited.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In response to this concern, some governments at the time limited the quantity of gunpowder that a person could possess, and\/or limited the amount that could be stored in a single container\u2026.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It requires no fancy to conclude that those same founding-era communities may well have responded to today\u2019s unprecedented concern about LCM use just as the Rhode Island General Assembly did: by limiting the number of bullets that could be held in a single magazine.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, HB 6614 is more modest than founding-era limits on the size of gun-powder containers in that it imposes no limits on the total amount of ammunition that gun owners may possess.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then he completed the \u201cworkaround\u201d he created in order to circumvent\u00a0Bruen\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>demands:<\/p>\n

In sum, the burden on self-defense imposed by HB 6614 is no greater than the burdens of longstanding, permissible arms regulations, and its justification compares favorably with the justification for prior bans on other arms found to pose growing threats to public safety.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Applying Bruen\u2019s metrics, our analogical reasoning very likely places LCMs well within the realm of devices that have historically been prohibited once their danger became manifest.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He executed his coup d\u2019etat:<\/p>\n

Common sense points in the same direction. It is fair to assume that our founders were, by and large, rational. To conclude that the Second Amendment allows banning sawed-off shotguns, Bowie knives, and M-16s \u2014 but not LCMs used repeatedly to facilitate the murder of dozens of men, women, and children in minutes \u2014 would belie that assumption.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Accordingly, it should not be surprising that Bruen\u2019s guidance in this case leads us to conclude that HB 6614 is likely both consistent with our relevant tradition of gun regulation and permissible under the Second Amendment.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this ruling isn\u2019t appealed and overturned, the implication remains: If semi-automatic rifles are similar, if not identical, to military grade M-16s, and the LCMs that feed them can be confiscated and their owners jailed, then it\u2019s a short step to declaring semi-automatic firearms themselves (both rifles and pistols) as contraband, and subject to the same penalties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Appeals Court Ruling Poses Danger of Confiscation of All Firearms An Obama-appointed judge in Rhode Island\u00a0authored an exceedingly dangerous opinion last week, rejecting arguments that the state\u2019s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds was unconstitutional. Instead, Judge William Kayatta, a graduate of Harvard Law School, built the case cleverly, declaring that LCMs (large … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courts","category-crap-for-brains","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100729,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100728\/revisions\/100729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}