Latest 4th Circuit Gun Ban Decision Highlights Legal Danger for Militia-Suitable Arms

Imagine the case being made in 1775 that this man had no right to his gun, and it was in the interests or public safety to take it from him– in other words, Gen. Gage’s position. Now imagine some Tory arguing such a gun was not in common use at the time. These lying arguments are exactly what modern gun-grabbers claim about today’s militia-suitable arms, and our right to keep and bear them.

Rather than send the Maryland firearm and magazine ban case back down to a lower court as ordered by a three-judge panel last month, a majority of the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals voted to rehear the case in May, The Washington Post reported. Maryland’s edict “bans the possession or sale of more than 45 types of assault weapons.”

The lawsuit challenging Maryland’s ban, enacted by “we must do something” opportunists following Sandy Hook, resulted in what attorney Andrew Branca called a “Big #2A Win,” in that the panel applied “strict scrutiny,” a standard of legal review requiring a “law must advance not merely any governmental interest, but in particular a compelling governmental interest [and] the law must also be narrowly tailored to actually achieve that interest.”

That’s a much higher bar to meet than “intermediate scrutiny,” which pretty much allows a government to get away with whatever it wants with an unproven “public safety” claim. Under strict scrutiny, Branca noted, “the vast majority of gun laws currently on the books would inescapably be found to be unconstitutional infringements of the Second Amendment, and discarded.”

More