By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--March 16, 2016
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"No one wants to take your guns away." That's been the Obama administration claim since day one. Of course, it was an outright lie. These people would love nothing more than to do away with the 2nd Amendment - and, with the death of Antonin Scalia, they finally have their chance.
According to the AP, sometime this afternoon Barack Obama will nominate appeals court judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. He'll present Garland as a "moderate" pick, and the media will dutifully parrot his position. Don't buy it.Back in 2007, Judge Garland voted to undo a D.C. Circuit court decision striking down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The liberal District of Columbia government had passed a ban on individual handgun possession, which even prohibited guns kept in one’s own house for self-defense. A three-judge panel struck down the ban, but Judge Garland wanted to reconsider that ruling. He voted with Judge David Tatel, one of the most liberal judges on that court. As Dave Kopel observed at the time, the “[t]he Tatel and Garland votes were no surprise, since they had earlier signaled their strong hostility to gun owner rights”In other words, you can bet that Garland will side with efforts to overturn Heller at the earliest possible moment - effectively gutting the 2nd Amendment. Even if he doesn't, Garland will more than likely be fine with the already-illegal notion of a federal firearms registry...
Moreover, in the case mentioned earlier, Garland voted with Tatel to uphold an illegal Clinton-era regulation that created an improvised gun registration requirement. Congress prohibited federal gun registration mandates back in 1968, but as Kopel explained, the Clinton Administration had been “retaining for six months the records of lawful gun buyers from the National Instant Check System.” By storing these records, the federal government was creating an informal gun registry that violated the 1968 law. Worse still, the Clinton program even violated the 1994 law that had created the NICS system in the first place. Congress directly forbade the government from retaining background check records for law abiding citizens. Garland thought all of these regulations were legalSo, assuming the AP has this right, Obama is about to nominate someone who will - almost certainly - decimate the 2nd Amendment. This is not unexpected. As I warned back in February, Justice Scalia's death made gun control the most important single issue of the 2016 election. Here's hoping that the eventual Republican noninee recognizes this, and is aware that the American people are ...let's say... 'disinterested' in watching liberals destroy their right to self-defense.
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