By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
ANALYSIS – For the first time in recent memory, if not recorded history, the U.S. Department of Justice is taking an aggressive posture in defending the Second Amendment, considered by many to be the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, while others think it is an anachronism, protective of a dangerous notion that citizens should be allowed to own firearms.
As noted by Fox News recently, the DOJ has taken “the unusual step of suing California and Virginia over their gun laws, marking what officials say is an unprecedented effort to enforce Second Amendment rights.”
What’s more, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division and ramrod of its first-in-history Second Amendment section, seems to relish going after state and local gun control laws and regulations.
Quoted by Fox News, Dhillon explained, “Since we started the Second Amendment section last year and even before that we filed over a dozen lawsuits challenging different restrictions in different jurisdictions.”
She mentioned problems such as “Denver’s AR-15 ban, Colorado’s large-capacity magazine restrictions, concealed carry permit delays in Los Angeles County, firearm regulations in the U.S. Virgin Islands and gun restrictions in the District of Columbia.”
“This is a really historic amount of activity from the Department of Justice to protect the Second Amendment,” Dhillon told Fox News Digital. “It’s never been done before.”
It’s hard stuff for some people to swallow, which may explain the Op-Ed appearing in the Sacramento Bee authored by Erwin Chemerinsky, identified as “a prominent American legal scholar, author, and the dean of UC Berkeley School of Law.”
Before readers collide with the SacBee’s pay wall, they can read, “The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, June 25, in Wolford v. Lopez, made clear that the conservative justices favor Second Amendment rights even over other traditional conservative values, such as protecting property rights and deferring to state governments. The court, in another 6-3 decision about gun rights, continued to greatly limit the ability of the government to protect public safety and save lives by regulating firearms.”
Actually, according to many in the Second Amendment community, the high court majority is merely raising and restoring the status of 2A rights up with the rest of our rights protected by the Constitution’s first Ten Amendments. Dhillon, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and a host of others have stated, “The Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
Apparently Chemerinsky didn’t get the memo.
The Bill of Rights is supposed to limit the ability of government to do all kinds of things. For example, before Miranda, the government often didn’t bother making sure criminal defendants had the benefit of legal counsel. The dean of a law school ought to know that.
Back in March, Dhillon told the Washington Times that “her office’s goal is to have all state regulations that are inconsistent with pro-Second Amendment cases be struck down, settled or withdrawn by the time she leaves her post.”
At the time, Dhillon revealed to commentator Dana Loesch, host of “The Dana Show,” that, “I’m hiring up and staffing up in our Second Amendment section And so if anyone watching this as a lawyer who’s passionate about these issues, or they’re passionate about them in general, we can train them up for these issues, but we’ve actually hired some great career lawyers here who come from the Second Amendment community…”
The gun prohibition lobby and its allies don’t like this. Indeed, they despise the idea that the Justice Department is actually defending this fundamental civil right. In the past state and federal attorneys general have traditionally sat back and let gun rights organizations including the Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, Firearms Policy Coalition and others pursue litigation, essentially doing the DOJ’s job, and that of state AGs.
They essentially allowed lawmakers to treat the right to keep and bear arms as a government-regulated privilege.
But now, with a Supreme Court majority more inclined to upholding the Constitution as a legal document to be interpreted as the Founders intended, and far less inclined to take an activist approach that treats the Constitution as a living document subject to change by “progressive (liberal)” whim, the time is right for Dhillon and her crew to make a course correction.
In the fall, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in cases challenging local and statewide bans on so-called “assault weapons.” The outcome will likely not be released until next June, but anti-gunners are already in a quiet panic, because their ultimate goal is to disarm the public, not be told by the highest court in the land that they can’t do it.
