BLUF
\nThe patience of the Second Amendment community is wearing thin, and this reply captures it very well. We have been given the runaround for too long. Justice has been denied through delay. Judicial processes have been manipulated to serve only one end: the affirmation of unconstitutional infringements.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s time for those games to come to a crashing end and for our Rights to be restored.<\/p>\n
Dear SCOTUS: Percolation Tests Are For Septic Tanks, Not Second Amendment Infringements<\/a><\/p>\n When faced with a problem, politicians have a tendency to not actually find the root cause of that problem and come with effective solutions to solve that problem. Their primary motivation is to\u00a0appear\u00a0like they\u2019re solving the problem in order to ensure their chances of reelection.<\/p>\n When looked at from this lens, \u201cassault weapon\u201d bans, and indeed the majority of gun control laws, make perfect sense. When crooks and crazies do bad things, the easiest and laziest thing that a politician can do is to demonize those who did\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0commit those evil deeds and don\u2019t have a mean bone in their bodies to ever commit such evil deeds in their lifetimes. But it\u2019s easy for politicians to say,\u00a0\u201cLook, your serf, if only\u00a0you<\/u>\u00a0gave up\u00a0your<\/u>\u00a0rights can we all be at peace.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAssault weapon\u201d bans are a crystallization of this logic. Most readers of this website are well aware, but for the tiny minority who aren\u2019t, an \u201cassault weapon\u201d is nothing more than an arbitrarily created category of arms. They are not functionally different from other arms. Banning them serves two purposes: 1) allow the politician to look good, and 2) set the legal stage, intentionally or not, for the ban of more arms by reclassifying them as \u201cassault weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n Second-Amendment organizations have been challenging these bans for a long time. Their lawsuits have been moving at a glacial pace, getting bounced around like a ping-pong ball from court to court. In 2022, the bans got their day in Court, when two bans \u2013 Miller v. Bonta (California), and Bianchi v. Frosch (Maryland) \u2013 were effectively overturned by the Supreme Court and sent back to lower courts for reconsideration.<\/p>\n But the Supreme Court underestimated the intransigence and dishonesty of the lower courts. After a couple of years worth of judicial games, lower courts have rubber-stamped \u201cassault weapon\u201d bans, and one of those cases \u2013 Snope v. Brown (a reincarnated version of Bianchi v. Frosch),\u00a0is knocking on the Supreme Court\u2019s door again<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maryland, of course, wants the Supreme Court\u00a0to not hear this case<\/a>. One of their pretexts is \u201cpercolation\u201d:<\/p>\n Whether assault weapons are covered by the text of the Second Amendment following Bruen, and whether a ban on such weapons is supported by this Nation\u2019s historical tradition, are questions that have only begun to percolate in the courts of appeals. <\/span><\/p>\n Jurisdictions in at least eight circuits have some form of ban on the possession of assault weapons. Yet to date, only two courts of appeals\u2014the Fourth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit\u2014have considered Bruen\u2019s application to assault weapons bans. And the Seventh Circuit has done so only in reviewing decisions whether to grant preliminary injunctive relief. <\/span><\/p>\n There is no reason why this Court should stray from its usual practice of allowing questions to percolate in multiple courts of appeals, with arguments tested and refined in cases litigated through final judgment on the merits, before granting certiorari.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Snope<\/em> is a case of \u201cbeen there, done that\u201d in the Fourth Circuit. It\u2019s already made one trip from the District Court to the Supreme Court and back. On its second, current iteration, It involved a disgusting game played by a dissenting anti-Second Amendment judge in the District Court, who withheld her dissent for a year just to deny justice by delaying it.<\/p>\n Allowing the broad question of the constitutionality of assault weapons bans (and all of the issues that question might encompass) to percolate in this manner will ensure that, if the Court does consider the question, it does so with the benefit of arguments that have been well-developed and repeatedly tested through the adversarial process.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Maryland wants to draw out the case as long as possible, not to allow lower courts to weigh in, but to allow the older conservative justices to age out. They\u2019re trying to draw the Court into a game of actuarial chicken.<\/strong><\/p>\n Snope\u2019s lawyers have\u00a0a fantastic reply<\/a>\u00a0to Maryland\u2019s dilatory games that dismantles the \u201cpercolation\u201d argument:<\/p>\n REASONS FOR GRANTING THE PETITION<\/span><\/p>\n Thirty years ago, this Court described the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle as a \u201ccivilian,\u201d \u201ccommonplace,\u201d \u201cgenerally available,\u201d and \u201ctraditionally \u2026 lawful\u201d firearm. Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 603, 611\u201312 (1994). <\/span><\/p>\n Sixteen years ago, this Court confirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individual citizens to possess firearms that are in common use for lawful purposes. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 624\u201325 (2008). <\/span><\/p>\n In the intervening sixteen years, semiautomatic rifles have continued to be \u201ccommonly available,\u201d Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406, 429\u201330 (2024) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting), and the AR-15 today is \u201cone of the most popular firearms in the United States,\u201d Definition of \u201cFrame or Receiver\u201d & Identification of Firearms, 87 F.R. 24562-01, 24,652 (2022). <\/span><\/p>\n This therefore should be an easy case\u2014the Second Amendment protects common firearms, semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are among the most common firearms in the Nation, therefore bans on semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 violate the Second Amendment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Yet, incredibly, in the sixteen years since Heller every single court of appeals to consider the question has concluded that such bans are constitutional, employing a variety of tests that are uniform only in their failure to adhere to the principles established by this Court. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Maryland asks this Court to deny certiorari to allow even more time for percolation, but enough is enough. The lower courts have proven themselves incapable of following Heller\u2019s clear guidance, and this Court should intervene without delay.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The patience of the Second Amendment community is wearing thin, and this reply captures it very well. We have been given the runaround for too long. Justice has been denied through delay. Judicial processes have been manipulated to serve only one end: the affirmation of unconstitutional infringements.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time for those games to come to a crashing end and for our Rights to be restored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BLUF The patience of the Second Amendment community is wearing thin, and this reply captures it very well. We have been given the runaround for too long. Justice has been denied through delay. Judicial processes have been manipulated to serve only one end: the affirmation of unconstitutional infringements. It\u2019s time for those games to come … 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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105814","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=105814"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105816,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105814\/revisions\/105816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}