On September 21, the Biden Administration filed an amicus brief in the pending U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, supporting New York’s draconian and unconstitutional restrictions on the right to bear firearms in public for self-defense.
New York’s law presumptively denies the right to bear arms for self-defense unless a license applicant can demonstrate a special need for self-protection that distinguishes the person from the general population.
In practice, this means the rich and well-connected can get unrestricted carry licenses but ordinary people cannot, even if they actually face a greater risk of being violently victimized while going about their daily lives in public. The law effectively nullifies for most New Yorkers what SCOTUS has already characterized as “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”
And this is absolutely fine for the Biden Administration, at least when it comes to the Second Amendment.
After all, Biden’s own son Hunter has the manifest privilege of violating with impunity various federal gun-control laws the government brief insists are so necessary to protect public safety.
The government’s brief, filed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice, also gives complete vindication to the NRA’s opposition to now Attorney General Merrick Garland’s nomination to SCOTUS in 2016, when he was a federal appellate judge. Anti-gun pundits had mocked that opposition at the time, falsely claiming there was no legal basis for it, even though Garland had voted to rehear a case that had ruled an outright ban on handgun possession violated the Second Amendment. Yet, the only plausible reason to support such a “do-over” was that the court had come to the wrong conclusion. Why repeat something
already done correctly?
Now, as AG, Garland is advocating that SCOTUS effectively remove the right to “bear arms” from the U.S. Constitution.
(For more details on the Biden Administration brief, go to nraila.org/articles/20210927/biden-administration-asks-the-us-supreme-court-to-judicially-nullify-the-right-to-bear-arms)
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