Washington, D.C.- Today, the National Foundation for Gun Rights (legal branch of the National Association for Gun Rights) filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court in United States v. Rahimi.
The Court will be hearing oral arguments in this case in early November.
“This is the first major Second Amendment case the Supreme Court has taken since last year’s Bruen decision. It’s important that we are there to remind the Court to double down on what they said in Bruen, particularly the ‘text, history, and tradition’ standard, instead of watering it down,” said Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights. “This case is only one of many lawsuits either underway or in the works challenging unconstitutional federal anti-gun laws. It is our hope the Court remains more loyal to the Second Amendment than to the longstanding federal gun control regime.”
The 6-3 Bruen decision affirmed the constitutionality of carrying a pistol in public without being subjected to a cost-benefit analysis by the state.
NFGR’s brief reminds the Court that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right, to be treated differently than the other Bill of Rights guarantees, and 18 U.S. C. § 922(g)(8)(C)(ii), the federal statute challenged in this case, does exactly that.
The brief states: “That the government’s amici are satisfied with – even applaud – the fact that under the statute a person can be stripped of his fundamental constitutional rights on such flimsy grounds betrays a mindset that does not really consider the right to keep and bear arms as a right to take seriously, much less defend vigorously.”
The brief goes on to point out that the federal government would never dream of enacting a parallel statute subjecting individuals under a restraining order to limitless unreasonable police searches of homes, concluding the following:
“Almost certainly it would never occur to the government or its amici to argue that a person has nothing to complain about so long as he has notice and a hearing before entry of a court order that serves as the basis for stripping him of his fundamental right to be free from unreasonable searches. What is the difference? The difference is that § 922(g)(8)(C)(ii) violates what is, in their view, the second-class Second Amendment right; whereas the hypothetical statute violates a first-class Fourth Amendment right that is worth defending.”
The brief also brings to the Court’s attention the numerous arguments the lower courts are using to attempt to circumvent the Bruen decision, asking the Court to provide clarity and reemphasize the Bruen standard.
The brief may be viewed here: https://gunrightsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/22-915-NAGR-Rahimi-brief.pdf
“The ink wasn’t even dry on Bruen before gun control fanatics slithered out of the woodwork to churn out new gun laws hoping to poke holes in the decision and weaken the Second Amendment protections the Supreme Court just affirmed,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights. “It is our hope that SCOTUS slaps down all the bogus gun control arguments that have popped up since Bruen, once and for all.”
The National Association for Gun Rights is the nation’s largest “no compromise” pro-gun organization, with 4.5 million members nationwide.
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