By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
One of the chief features of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was the federal ban on interstate handgun purchases, but now a three-judge pane of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled 2-to-1 that this prohibition violates the Second Amendment.
In a case known as Elite Precision Customs v. ATF, the Fifth Circuit ruling, Judge Jerry E. Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, notes, “Plaintiffs unsuccessfully sought a permanent injunction against several provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 922 that collectively prohibit the buying and selling of handguns across state lines. The only issue is whether those provisions are constitutional under the Second Amendment. They are not: Under Bruen, they implicate the Second Amendment’s plain text, making them presumptively unconstitutional, and the government has failed to meet its burden to justify the provisions as consistent with the nation’s tradition of firearms regulation. We reverse and render judgment for plaintiffs.”
The case was brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Elite Precision and two private citizens. They are represented by attorneys David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson, and William V. Bergstrom of Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C., Cody J. Wisniewski of FPC Action Foundation, and R. Brent Cooper of Cooper & Scully in Dallas, Texas.
In a news release posted at The Outdoor Wire, FPC President Brandon Combs declared the ruling to be a “massive victory for the People and another major defeat for the federal government’s unconstitutional gun-control regime.”
In its 16-page ruling, the court majority states, “The Second Amendment’s plain text makes explicit reference only to the ‘keeping’ and ‘bearing’ of arms, but it is well established in the Ameri can legal tradition that the right to keep firearms logically entails the right to purchase them as well.”
The decision also says, “The Ban, true to its name, categorically bars an entire class of otherwise lawful firearms purchases. The Ban is not a mere stipulation upon an otherwise safeguarded right to purchase firearms in the course of “keeping” them. Rather, the Ban disqualifies all direct handgun purchases across state lines, and there is no such thing as ‘a purchase ban unknown at the time of the founding that can evade Bruen analysis.’”
Judge Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee, offered a terse dissent, asserting that the provisions of federal law targeted by the lawsuit “are not unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.”
But Judge Smith’s prevailing opinion observes, “At bottom, the government’s theory of the Ban’s historical justification centers on its contention that ‘when it enacted the Omnibus Crime Control Act and the Gun Control Act of 1968 [which contains all of the pro visions comprising the Ban], Congress sought to address concerns about public safety and that individuals deemed dangerous might evade state laws designed to ensure only law-abiding citizens could acquire firearms by purchasing them outside the jurisdiction.’ In other words, the ‘why’ that the government seeks to find in the historical record is peacetime protection of the public from violent criminals, and the ‘how’ that the government would have us identify is comity among all the jurisdictions within a single sovereign. On that account, the government’s proffer, though reflecting impressive historical research, falls well short of the mark.”
