By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Attorneys representing the Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and other plaintiffs have filed a supplemental opening brief in their challenge of Maryland’s ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
The new brief is based on the Supreme Court’s remand of the case back to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals following the landmark ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in June. Critics of the ban maintain it is unconstitutional, and language in the Bruen ruling, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, could bear that out.
SAF and CCRKBA are joined by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Field Traders, LLC, and three private citizens: David Snope, Micah Schaefer and Dominic Bianchi, for whom the case is named. Defendants are Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, State Police Secretary Col. Woodrow W. Jones, III, Baltimore County Sheriff R. Jay Fisher and Anne Arundel County Sheriff Jim Fredericks, all in their official capacities.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Raymond M. DiGuiseppe, DiGuiseppe Law Firm P.C. in Southport, N.C. and David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson and Tiernan B. Kane, Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, Washington, D.C. The case is known as Bianchi v. Frosh.
The brief details how the high court in Bruen overruled the use of “intermediate scrutiny” in such cases as Bianchi, and instead mandated “the only way that a law burdening conduct falling within the Second Amendment’s scope can be upheld is if the government can demonstrate a ‘historical tradition’ of regulations, rooted in the Founding Era, that burdened the right in a similar way and for similar reasons.” Further, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen “demonstrates that Maryland’s ban on certain semiautomatic rifles is unconstitutional.”
“The Bruen ruling effectively ended lower court ‘means-end scrutiny’ of Second Amendment challenges that have allowed perpetuation of extremist gun laws banning firearms that are in common use,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “In that regard, the Bruen decision makes it difficult to uphold certain laws, especially when they arbitrarily ban whole classes of firearms and criminalize their possession, clearly violating a citizen’s individual right to keep and bear arms.”An affirmative ruling overturning Maryland’s ban could have a significant impact on other states where bans have been enacted, or may be proposed via legislation or citizen initiative, Gottlieb observed. That’s why the Bianchi case is so important in SAF’s effort to win firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time.
