“Gun Laws And What The Second Amendment Intended”: When The NRA Didn’t Support Everything That Goes ‘Bang’!
As school shootings erupt with sickening regularity, Americans once again are debating gun laws. Quickly talk turns to the Second Amendment.
But what does it mean? History offers some surprises: It turns out in each era, the meaning is set not by some pristine constitutional text, but by the push and pull, the rough and tumble of public debate and political activism. And gun rights have always coexisted with responsibility.
At 27 words long, the provision is the shortest sentence in the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Modern readers squint at its stray commas and confusing wording. The framers believed in freedom to punctuate.
It turns out that to the framers, the amendment principally focused on those “well regulated militias.” These militias were not like anything we know now: Every adult man (eventually, every white man) served through their entire lifetime. They were actually required to own a gun, and bring it from home.
Think of the minutemen at Lexington and Concord, who did battle with the British army. These squads of citizen soldiers were seen as a bulwark against tyranny. When the Constitution was being debated, many Americans feared the new central government could crush the 13 state militias. Hence, the Second Amendment. It protected an individual right – to fulfill the public responsibility of militia service.
What about today’s gun-rights debates? Surprisingly, there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention; nor with scattered exceptions in the transcripts of the ratification debates in the states; nor on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as it marked up the Second Amendment, where every single speaker talked about the militia. James Madison’s original proposal even included a conscientious objector clause: “No person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
To be clear, there were plenty of guns in the founding era. Americans felt they had the right to protect themselves, especially in the home, a right passed down from England through common law. But there were plenty of gun laws, too. Boston made it illegal to keep a loaded gun in a home, due to safety concerns. Laws governed the location of guns and gunpowder storage. New York, Boston and all cities in Pennsylvania prohibited the firing of guns within city limits. States imposed curbs on gun ownership. People deemed dangerous were barred from owning weapons. Pennsylvania disarmed Tory sympathizers.
That balance continued throughout our history, even in the Wild West. A historic photo of Dodge City, Kansas, the legendary frontier town, shows a sign planted in the middle of its main street: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” Few thought the Constitution had much to say about it.
Through much of history, this balance evoked little controversy. Even the National Rifle Association embraced it. Today the NRA is known for harsh anti-government rhetoric, but it was started to train former Union soldiers in marksmanship. In the 1930s, the group testified for the first federal gun law. In 1968, its American Rifleman magazine told its readers the NRA “does not necessarily approve of everything that goes ‘Bang!’”
Of course, over the past three decades, the NRA shifted sharply. At the group’s 1977 annual meeting, still remembered as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” moderate leaders were voted out and the organization was recast as a constitutional crusade.
Together with even more intense advocates, such as the Second Amendment Foundation, of Bellevue, Washington, they are quick to decry any gun laws as an assault on a core, sacred constitutional right. They waged a relentless constitutional campaign to change the way we see the amendment.
Remarkably, the first time the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to gun ownership was in 2008. The decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, rang loudly. But a close read shows that Justice Antonin Scalia and his colleagues make the familiar point that gun rights and responsibilities go together. The court said that, like all constitutional rights, there could be limits. “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” Scalia wrote.
That’s how judges have interpreted this constitutional right. Dozens of courts have examined gun laws since 2008. Overwhelmingly they have upheld them, despite the claims of gun-rights attorneys. Yes, there is an individual right to gun ownership — but with rights come responsibilities. Society, too, has a right to safety, and there is a compelling public interest in laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
To be sure, the final scope of the constitutional provision has not been determined. The Supreme Court has not spoken again. It is infallible because it is final, as Justice Robert Jackson once wrote, not final because it is infallible. But the greatest controversy revolves around issues such as the rules for carrying a gun outside the home.
So what does the Second Amendment really mean? From the debate over the Constitution to today’s gun fights, the answer is really up to us, to the people. That answer changes over time. But one thing has remained surprisingly constant: Americans cherish freedom, but believe passionately that rights demand responsibilities. It’s hard to think of an area where that insight matters more than when it comes to ensuring that lethal weapons do not fall into the wrong hands.
By: Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law; The National Memo, July 14, 2014
“Radical Libertarianism Reshaping The Bench”: John Roberts’ Supreme Court Is The Most Meddlesome In U.S. History
For the third straight July, the Supreme Court left court-watchers scratching their heads about whether the Court lived up to its reputation as the “most conservative” in generations, if not ever. In the New York Times, former Obama Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal hailed “The Supreme Court’s Powerful New Consensus.” Liberal experts tended to echo Slate’s Emily Bazelon in dismissing such revisionists as hoodwinked by “the devastating, sneaky genius of John Roberts’ [superficially anodyne but right-tilting] opinions.”
What strikes me is a libertarian streak in the justices’ opinions. On civil liberties, where right- and left-leaning libertarians concur—in particular, Fourth Amendment protection for smartphones—the Court moved the law to the left. But, likewise reflecting libertarian ascendance, the Court continues to veer sharply right on issues touching on corporate autonomy and regulation of business. Most importantly, this term’s cases confirm a critical but generally overlooked facet of twenty-first century libertarian jurisprudence. It is not just about reclaiming what Randy Barnett famously called the “lost Constitution.” Less visibly but often more consequentially, libertarian academics, advocates, and judges have long advocated thrusting the courts into much more aggressive roles in resolving the details of messy non-constitutional disputes—in interpreting statutes, and, in particular, in scrutinizing and micro-managing executive and regulatory agencies’ applications of the laws they administer. Here, the not-always-tacit agenda has been to gum up the works of progressive programs that, realistically, cannot be repealed or invalidated outright.
A window onto this Court’s reactionary drift opened during a testy exchange at an oral argument six months ago on January 21. The case was Harris v. Quinn, which involved a challenge to the authority of state governments to permit public employee unions to collect fees covering the costs of negotiating on behalf of non-members they are legally required to represent. Choosing her words pointedly, Justice Elena Kagan questioned the challenging non-members’ counsel:
Since 1948, since the Taft-Hartley Act, there has been a debate in every State across this country about whether to be a right-to-work State, and people have disagreed. … And is it fair to say that you’re suggesting here … that, for 64 years, people have been debating the wrong question … because, in fact, a right-to-work law is constitutionally compelled? (emphasis added)
The challengers’ counsel, a staff attorney for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, did not flinch. “In the public sector,” he responded, “Yes, … compulsory fees are illegal under the First Amendment.”
When the Court finally released its decision, on the final day of the term, June 30, it did not exactly dial back those 64 years, at least not for all public workers and workplaces nationwide. Justice Alito’s 5-4 majority decision barred the imposition of union fees on non-members, but only with regard to a novel category he created—“personal homecare assistants,” or nurses and other providers paid by state governments with Medicaid funds, to treat disabled and poor elderly patients in their homes.
But what matters about this case is not the answer the conservative majority gave on its particular facts, but the question they chose to answer. As Justice Kagan noted, that question—whether state (or federal) law can authorize public employee unions to distribute the costs of representation across all employees in a bargaining unit, while requiring the union to represent non-union members as well as members—had for generations been completely off the table. The conservative majority has put that fundamental understanding in play, by transmuting the First Amendment—heretofore understood as a safeguard for civil liberties—into a functional regulator of economic relations, and de-stabilizing nearly three quarters of a century of constitutional precedents. These precedents are not technicalities. On the contrary, were the case-law otherwise, all employees, union members as well as non-members, would have every incentive to “free-ride,” and reap the benefits of union representation without sharing in the costs. Public employee unionism would be weakened, if not crippled.
The doctrinal counter-revolution is not confined to labor-management relations. Prior to the New Deal, the Supreme Court pushed an anti-regulatory agenda in the name of safeguarding individuals’ economic liberty. The FDR Court repudiated this tradition in a 1938 decision about milk regulation, United States v. Carolene Products. Carolene Products laid down a landmark a rule: Economic regulatory legislation “is not to be pronounced unconstitutional unless, in the light of the facts made known or generally assumed, it is of such a character as to preclude the assumption that it rests upon some rational basis within the knowledge and experience of the legislators.” Harris v. Quinn flagrantly violates that rule. States surely have a “rational basis” for ensuring fair-share contributions from non-union public employees.
After 1938, through the balance of the twentieth century, and, indeed, well into the twenty-first, Supreme Court majorities never overtly and, only rarely, departed from or implicitly challenged the hands-off economic regulation mandate of rational basis deference. Of course, during those decades, there were recurrent, fiery right-left battles on and about the Supreme Court. But those battles were about the extent to which the Court should actively protect individual civil and political rights, not economic rights. Only a small cadre of libertarian academics and think tanks disputed the consensus confining economic liberty to second-class constituitonal status. No more. No longer marginalized, libertarian-inspired legal ideas are now a force to be reckoned with. That tectonic shift was first proclaimed two years ago in the Court’s opinions in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and expansion of Medicaid, even though Chief Justice John Roberts’ controlling opinion largely upheld the law. This term’s decisions reinforce that trend.
Although Harris v. Quinn invoked the Constitution to trump an incontestably rational regulatory law, other important decisions about regulation and the economy this term involved ordinarily below-the-radar questions of statutory interpretation and judicial deference to agency decisions. And libertarian academics’ and advocates’ enthusiasm for replacing Carolene Products-style rational basis deference with active judicial micro-management left an imprint in nearly all of them. For example, reviewing the first tranche of President Obama’s global warming program, Justice Scalia, writing for a seven-member majority, struck down the regulation at issue, and castigated EPA for reading an exception into an assertedly “unambiguous” statutory provision. But the Court then read a similar exception into another statutory term, that yielded 97 percent of the on-the-ground results the agency’s version would have achieved. How could EPA’s version have no defensibly rational basis, and why would the justices not simply defer, if it differed so immaterially from theirs?The answer seems to be that Scalia and his colleagues felt it important to assert their power to substitute their judgment for the agency’s—EPA or any other agency—almost for the sake of doing so.
Similarly, in its two decisions reviewing Affordable Care Act contraception regulations, the conservative majority second-guessed extraordinarily granular Executive Branch policy and factual determinations, substituting their own ideas for configuring a compromise to mesh competing policy goals attributed to two statutes, the ACA and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The majority suggested that alternative administrative solutions were readily available, that would, consistent with the Court’s orders, permit employees and students, in institutions averse to including contraception coverage in their health insurance plans, “to obtain, without cost, the full range of FDA approved contraceptives.” Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and many health experts, vehemently disagreed. The lasting lesson from these cases is not which side is right, but that the conservative justices are so eager to reach to tackle these policy and factual kerfuffles at all. Such judicial intrusions, into the nitty-gritty of implementing complex, often conflicting statutory provisions, mock landmark decisions—by the Rehnquist Court no less than its more liberal predecessors—that long enforced and repeatedly reaffirmed the post-New Deal consensus mandating judicial restraint and deference to Congressional and Executive legislative and policy judgments.
Looking to the future, most of the battles over preserving the progressive jurisprudence that kept hostile judges from crippling the New Deal, the Great Society, and—so far—the major products of President Barack Obama’s tenure, could well be fought on these non-constitutional fronts. Already, some observers have noted that in several end-of-term opinions, justices on both sides of the Court’s ideological divide have sparred elaborately about methodologies for interpreting statutes and reviewing agency actions. Could these academic-seeming debates constitute “shadow-boxing” over potential high-voltage controversies that could wind up on next year’s docket and beyond? A particular target for speculation in this vein, especially on the right, is a brace of pending cases currently poised for decision in two courts of appeal, in which ACA opponents hope to shut down Healthcare.gov. They claim that a four-word phrase in the Act must be read in isolation, to permit only state-run exchanges, not federally run exchanges in the 36 states that have opted out of setting up exchanges of their own, to provide tax credits and subsidies for low and moderate income applicants for health insurance. So far, that claim has been rejected by the two district courts yet to rule, as contrary to what even Justice Scalia, in his Clean Air Act global warming decision opinion this June, acknowledged as the “fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” Much could depend on whether Justice Scalia and the rest of his conservative colleagues choose to take that “fundamental canon” seriously, if and when the fate of Obamacare is once again on their griddle.
By: Simon Lazarus, The New Republic, July 10, 2014
“It Will Be Ugly, And It Will Escalate”: Buffer Zones, Clinic Escorting, And The Myth Of The Quiet Sidewalk Counselors
The Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts “buffer zone” law — which barred antiabortion protests immediately outside clinics. Justice Scalia portrayed the law as hindering ‘sidewalk counselors’ who lovingly entreated women to consider alternatives. This portrayal, embodied by the grandmotherly petitioner, allowed some to view the decision as protecting gentle civility. Referencing one particular Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston, this “quiet counseling” was seen as well-intentioned, and, more importantly, constitutional.
It is also a myth — or at least a dramatic euphemism that applies to very few at the Boston site. I should know. I was there.
For four years, I volunteered as an escort on Saturday mornings. The scene described in the court — like a delusional game of telephone — was drastically different from reality.
Our mornings were mostly spent scanning the streets, attempting to spot patients before they approached the zealous spectacle. We’d tactfully ask if they were looking for the clinic, and walk them through the crowd.
Saturdays were favored by protesters, so escorts arrived in the early morning. Wearing identifying vests, we flanked the entrance and greeted patients outside the zone. Two would rotate to the back to watch the garage entrance, where only the more tenacious protestors wandered. We’d accompany patients up the long walk to the front, usually trailed by someone asking if Satan sent us. (He didn’t.)
During the freezing New England winters, we would briefly warm up inside, but were mostly left to stomp our feet and count how many toes we could feel. Once a month, a Christian band would show up, surreally, and hold a concert.
We knew the “quiet counseling” well. “Just like Auschwitz,” one would say, “you’re delivering them right into the furnace.” This particular protester would speak right into her ear — until he approached the painted line on the ground.
Sometimes, a male accompanying a patient would lose his cool. He could have been her boyfriend or brother. We didn’t know and never asked. Once they entered, the doors could burst back open and he would charge whichever protestor called his companion a whore. We would intervene.
Justice Alito felt the law represented “viewpoint discrimination” — constitutionally, one message can’t be favored over another. But as an escort, I never talked about abortion, even outside the zone. When guiding patients, I would detail what they could expect. I didn’t offer my perspective, or even criticize the protestors. My goal was to provide a calming presence seconds before what would be one of the more trying moments of their lives. I explained how to access the clinic, and maintained a low patter to distract them from strangers calling them beasts and murderers. If they were confused by the protestors’ Boston Police hats, we cleared that up too.
If the patient was African-American, the protestors said they were “lynching” their child. If the protestor was crying, they said the tears would never stop, even in hell. If a patient was with her mother, they thanked the mother — for not killing her own baby.
Surprisingly, those Saturdays were not without their lighter moments. For a group dedicated to attacking Planned Parenthood — a multi-purpose clinic — they seemed stunned when someone wasn’t seeking an abortion. “You’ll never be the same. You’ll always be a dirty killer,” one would say. A startled patient would respond, “Why would a Pap smear make me a dirty killer?” Many others sought birth control — though they didn’t approve of that either.
This is not to paint all protesters as unhinged. I still remember one young priest who didn’t condemn me and chose instead to make small talk — which we continued periodically. Another time, upon news of the Columbia shuttle deteriorating upon reentry, we all shared a collective moment of humanity.
Being in a college area, there were counter-protestors (also kept out of the buffer zone) — who promoted pro-choice politics through direct and shocking slogans. Many of us didn’t care for them either. We just wanted calm in an atmosphere of invective and hysteria.
The desire for calm stemmed, in part, from the 1994 Brookline shootings. The victims were known by some of my fellow volunteers. This very real risk led the police to call for a buffer zone. One of the victims, a 25-year-old receptionist, was not just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder was premeditated; her killer focused on her.
Even when I was there, clinic staff driving up would be greeted with protestors filming them and, not so subtly, stating the staffer’s home address. Those were the more chilling moments.
It is difficult (though not impossible) to argue that a unanimous Supreme Court case was wrongly decided. After all, it is a broad law. But that is not my goal. Instead, I’m writing to dispel the myth painted of Good Samaritans softly offering a helping hand. In the public relations war over whether the affected individuals were compassionate counselors or marauding bullies, many justices seemed to accept the former characterization.
The law was overturned as an overreaching infringement on free speech. Is this a free speech issue? Yes, of course it is. But as others have pointed out, buffer zones exist elsewhere, including outside the Supreme Court. Favoring free speech, the Court famously allowed Nazis to march in Illinois and, more recently, the Phelps church to picket funerals (at a distance). But parades and funerals eventually end. Here, the Court risks turning clinic entrances into permanently hostile environments — inciting those who have spent weeks agonizing over their decision. They overturned the express wishes of an elected legislature — including pro-life lawmakers who supported the measure in the interest of public safety.
Similar zones were upheld by the court in 2000, a ruling which was not overturned. Clinic entrances still cannot be blocked, and injunctions are allowed against particularly worrisome parties. Chief Justice Roberts even suggested other mechanisms the state can use in lieu of the zone. But it’s an ever-changing landscape, and those remaining precautions have become the next targets of these quiet counselors. Because, to those that brought the case, speech alone is not the goal.
The grueling decision of whether to have an abortion should never be taken lightly, and there is no shortage of advocates for either side that fill our collective eardrums. But that debate stops a few feet outside the clinic. Just like politicking outside voting booths, these last ditch efforts lose the veneer of debate and become akin to intimidation — which can easily morph into confrontation or devastating anguish. Anyone who wants to stop and chat can do so. But once patients decide to cross the line, they should be left alone. The Court noted that the environment is currently more peaceful than it once was. There’s a reason for that.
None of this is to say that this isn’t a legitimate debate. It is. But those who favor stripping the buffer zone away — what small help it is — shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a flood of polite conversation will follow. It will be ugly, and it will escalate.
By: Brian Giacometti, Field-based NGO Program Manager for Governance and Rule of Law; The Huffington Post Blog, July 7, 2014
“So When Is The Senate In Recess?”: An Extended Recess Broken Up By Several Pro Forma Sessions Is Still A Recess
Before the Circuit Court went all activist in the Canning case, everyone thought the question was defining what counted as a “recess.” On that issue, the Supreme Court had a clear answer today: “For purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says that it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business.”
That’s a nominal defeat for President Barack Obama, who had claimed that an extended recess broken up by several pro forma sessions is still a recess.
The history here is that a Senate with a Democratic majority used pro forma sessions every three days in 2007-2008 to prevent President George W. Bush from making recess appointments, and Bush didn’t contest the maneuver. Then, in 2011, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives tried the same workaround, which forced the Senate to stay “in session” because of the constitutional provision that when one chamber is in session, the other cannot adjourn for “more than three days.”
The Senate-initiated attempt to block recess appointments seemed dicey, but probably reasonable. The House-initiated obstruction, however, was constitutionally noxious. After all, the House has no constitutional role in presidential nominations. By refusing to recess, the Senate essentially is enforcing its role in advise and consent. That changes when lawmakers hold pro forma sessions instead of “real” sessions and enforce that role at their convenience. When the House does it, however, that chamber is being inserted into matters it has no business being involved in.
The court didn’t differentiate those two very different situations today, but Associate Justice Stephen Breyer reminded everyone that there is another option for combating the House: The Constitution allows the president to act if the two chambers cannot agree on adjournment. Although I argued strongly at the time that Democrats shouldn’t allow the House to veto nominations — and that therefore Obama should have acted — I believed that the unused Article II power of adjournment was the safest constitutional ground.
As it turns out, the House option is pretty much a moot question since Senate Democrats pushed through the nuclear option, which allows nominations to go through with a simple majority vote. The House option for obstruction was relevant only in cases in which the president and Senate majority were from one party, and the House majority and a Senate minority large enough to kill nominations by filibuster were from the other party. Given simple majority confirmation, the House no longer has the power to obstruct. I suppose it’s still true that a president and the Senate majority might prefer a simple recess appointment to going through the hurdles of confirmation, even if it’s guaranteed to happen, but that’s not as big a deal as the attempt to nullify entire agencies by the House in conjunction with a Senate minority.
To be sure, the Senate will still have the ability to refuse to confirm any nominee and to prevent recess appointments. But that was always going to be the case; the only thing at stake here (on the narrow question of what counts as a recess) was how inconvenient it was going to be for the Senate to do so. In the long term, odds are that future legislation will be written more carefully to prevent nullification by obstructing nominations, now that Republicans have revealed that such a weapon is available and will be used. Constitutionally, none of that is a big deal.
To get into the details, the question of what counts as a “recess” is complicated because the Constitution doesn’t offer a definition, and usage now and then is ambiguous. Both Breyer and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia discussed two meanings (recess between two sessions of Congress and recess within one session). But, in fact, there are three usages: everyone in and around Congress knows that “recess” can mean both short periods when Congress is out for a weekend, the night, or even lunch, or it can mean the longer “district work periods” that last for a week (with surrounding weekends) or longer. Without explaining it very well and therefore opening himself up to Scalia’s claims that it’s just an arbitrary ruling, Breyer is basically attempting to follow that perfectly common-sense, ordinary usage distinction. That is the correct way to go; it’s the only option that really conforms to Senate practice.
That leaves the question about the pro forma sessions. Breyer puts a fair amount of weight on the ability of the Senate to transact business (by unanimous consent, or presumably by a voice vote if it wasn’t challenged) during these sessions. That’s true, but it’s also true that everyone talks and acts as if the Senate is in a normal recess during those periods. So the court has erred, but it’s a close call, and relatively little is at stake in this portion of the decision, especially in the post-nuclear era.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, June 27, 2014
‘Looking Beyond The Store Countertop”: Maybe The Supreme Court Isn’t As Pro-Gun As We Thought
Bruce Abramski must have known he was going to get into trouble when he bought a Glock 19 for his uncle. A retired police officer, Abramski was familiar with gun regulation. Yet he accepted $400 from his uncle, went to a local gun store, and—as required to purchase the Glock—filled out federal Form 4473. Question 11.a of that form required Abramski to confirm that he was “the actual transferee/buyer of the firearm(s)?” Question 11.a includes, in stark bold lettering “You are not the actual buyer if you are acquiring the firearm(s) on behalf of another person. If you are not the actual buyer, the dealer cannot transfer the firearm(s) to you.” Nonetheless, Abramski signed the form, knowingly lying about his intentions in purchasing the gun for his uncle.
When he was finally caught, Abramski answered with the audacity increasingly typical among a certain class of gun owners: He insisted the law itself was illegal. His lying, he claimed, was perfectly lawful. Surprisingly, he almost convinced the Supreme Court to let him off. Instead, a narrow majority of the Court declined Abramski’s invitation to gut one of the nation’s most important laws designed to reduce easy access to guns by felons and the mentally ill. The ruling is a relief to law enforcement—and a setback for the National Rifle Association.
Law enforcement will be happy because the majority’s decision affirmed the continued viability of the federal prohibitions on gun trafficking. Nearly half of all trafficking investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the main federal agency overseeing gun sales, involve what Abramski did. It’s called “straw purchasing,” and it occurs when one person buys a gun for another person. People who can’t pass a background check, say, because of a prior felony conviction, persuade someone else to go to a gun store for them. It could be a girlfriend, a young recruit into the gang, or just someone looking to make a quick buck. Studies show that criminals often use straw purchasers to obtain firearms.
Abramski wasn’t planning to give his gun to a criminal. It was for his uncle, who wasn’t prohibited himself from purchasing firearms. In the lower courts, Abramski emphasized this argument. Because the uncle could have bought the Glock 19, Abramski’s misrepresentation on Form 4473 was not, as the law required, “material to the lawfulness of the sale.” This argument had a certain logic to it, even if it wasn’t especially persuasive in the end. The lie was still material because the gun store, which needs to verify the background of the buyer, would not have been allowed to sell the gun to Abramski had he told the truth. At the Supreme Court, however, Abramski decided to go further: He said he could lie regardless of his uncle’s eligibility. As is so often the case in today’s gun debate, a reasonable argument is pushed aside in favor of a more extreme and dangerous one.
Abramski’s extreme claim was that straw purchasing was not illegal at all. The law, he argued, only required the gun store to check his own background because he was the purchaser. It didn’t matter what he did with the gun later or whether he was already intending to sell it to his uncle, his aunt, or some dude he met at a gun show. As Justice Scalia, who agreed with this argument, wrote in dissent on behalf of Justices Alito, Thomas, and Chief Justice Roberts: “If I give my son $10 and tell him to pick up milk and eggs at the store, no English speaker would say that the store sells the milk and eggs to me.”
Writing for a majority that included Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, Justice Kagan declined to buy what Scalia and Abramski were selling. In holding that federal law intends to look beyond the store countertop (Abramski and the gun dealer) to see who the actual purchaser is (the uncle), Kagan was clearly worried about the AFT’s continued ability to prosecute gun trafficking. The “overarching reason” to reject Abramski’s circumscribed interpretation is that it “would undermine—indeed, for all important purposes, would virtually repeal—the gun law’s core provisions.”
Repealing gun control is exactly what the NRA, which filed a brief in support of Abramski, was hoping for. Although famous for saying we need to enforce existing gun laws, here at least the NRA was trying to make it harder to enforce federal law. Perhaps this is an example of what’s been called the NRA’s gun control “Catch-22”: make gun laws impossible to enforce, then point to the laws’ ineffectiveness as a reason to get rid of them. Had the NRA’s position won in the Court, tomorrow they’d be saying the background check law doesn’t work because it doesn’t stop straw purchasing.
Whatever the NRA’s motive, the nation’s leading gun rights organization will be disheartened by today’s ruling. It’s bad enough, from the NRA’s perspective, that the Court strengthened the hand of ATF—long the target of the NRA’s hostility. Worse, the Abramski case saw Justice Kennedy siding with the liberal wing of the Court to uphold a gun control law. Ever since the Supreme Court breathed new life into the Second Amendment in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, another narrow, 5–4 decision, the NRA has been counting on Justice Kennedy to side with it in the NRA’s challenges to gun control.
Based on that expectation, the NRA has been pursuing lawsuits around the nation challenging a variety of gun control laws. The most significant of these are laws restricting who can carry guns in public. Just this term, the NRA and other gun rights advocates petitioned the Court to rule on that issue in several different cases. Although the Court has so far declined to hear any of those cases—and today’s case was not framed as a Second Amendment case—today’s ruling shows that Justice Kennedy is willing to support gun control. For people on either side of the gun debate, that may be the most important signal to come from the Court’s ruling.
By: Adam Winkler, Professor of Constitutional Law at The UCLA School of Law; The New Republic, June 6, 2014
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