The rulings in Maryland and Oregon come amid a shifting legal landscape in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that has imposed new limits on gun regulation.
In the wake of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that significantly limits what the government can do to restrict guns, states led by Democrats have scrambled to circumvent or test the limits of the ruling. A few have approved new gun restrictions. Oregon even passed a ballot initiative to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines.
But this week, supporters of the new gun measures suffered a pair of setbacks, underscoring the rippling effect of the court’s decision.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., ruled that a 10-year-old Maryland law related to licensing requirements for handguns was unconstitutional.
Under the Maryland law, an applicant for a handgun license must meet four requirements. They must be at least 21 years old, a resident of the state, complete a gun safety course and undergo a background check to ensure they are not barred under federal or state law from owning a firearm.
An applicant must then fill out an application, pay a processing fee, and wait up to 30 days for a state official to issue a license.
The appeals court ruled that requiring applicants to wait up to 30 days for a handgun permit violated the constitutional rights of citizens, and “the law’s waiting period could well be the critical time in which the applicant expects to face danger.”
I fucking hate these cretins in our judiciary.
Critical time where the applicant expects to face danger
I needs my guns the minute I needs them. Vending machines full of guns should be on every street corner so I have access to the firepower and ammunition I need at all times.
Usually if you need a gun that fast something bad is going down because you’re angry.
Citizens wouldn’t be facing so much danger if we didn’t have guns everywhere…
I guess abusive partners and family members don’t exist outside of America.
Most murders occur by firearm and it’s not even close. We’re in an arms race with each other to defend ourselves against all the guns that are causing our deaths. It’s a dangerous spiral.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/
And guns are part of the tools that abusers use in abusing:
For example, the 8-fold increase in intimate partner femicide risk associated with abusers’ access to firearms attenuated to a 5-fold increase when characteristics of the abuse were considered, including previous threats with a weapon on the part of the abuser. This suggests that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.93.7.1089#_i8
A small percentage (5%) of both case and control women lived apart from the abuser and owned a gun, however, and there was no clear evidence of protective effects.
A victim’s access to firearms has little effect on their protection, but abuser’s access consistently makes abuse worse for the victims.
It’s fine to assume that victims need access to firearms for protection because on the surface it sounds sensible, but the data shows that firearm access is actually making abuse situations worse for the victims.
I am more offended by them saying you have to be 21 years old. If you are old enough to be drafted for the military then you should be old enough to have a firearm. Same with the right to vote.
You should have to be older to be drafted (or get rid of the draft entirely, which is my opinion).
Having the right to vote I don’t think should confer you automatic rights to own a firearm. Voting is a much more powerful right in the first place.
Now, if you pay taxes on wages at all, you should be given the right to vote, such as working 16 year olds.
This is basically how gun laws have worked in Canada for ages. Treating access to guns the same way you do cars just makes sense. Of course the ease of being able to smuggle weapons bought from the unregulated US sources has meant that gun crime here is still a major problem compared to countries who share borders with others with similar gun control laws. The majority of gun crime in Canada happens with illegally sourced weapons 85% of which has been sourced to guns purchased in the US. Mexico experiences a similar issue.
Gun pollution spreads over our borders and the US is simply big enough and self obsessed enough to not care. Every democratic nation has it’s own version of the US Constitution and unlike when the US Constitution was written, democracies now make up the majority of government systems on the world stage. There are now a lot of democratic societies who have been stable and just fine without massive amounts of citizen gun ownership. In a very real way American gun law structured as it is interferes with our country’s ability to address guns on our own democratic and constitutional grounds.
Democracy and freedoms of the kind the US bills itself on is now considered pretty basic worldwide. Anyone operating on an originalist veiw really needs to unbury their head from the sand and realize how much the world has changed since it was written.
“Sorry bro, you’re going to have to wait for the first amendment to kick in.”
“Yeah, we’re gonna have to quarter soldiers here. Sorry, you don’t get 3rd amendment protections for another month.”
“Sorry bro, you’re going to have to wait for the first amendment to kick in.”
Go protest without waiting for a permit in any sufficiently busy city.
Why do you think law abiding citizens should be subjected to waiting periods to exercise their constitutional rights?
The constitutional right to acquire arms immediately and without precondition, I see. Just like the constitutional right to say anything, at any time, without any consequences.
This doesn’t remove all background checks, so “immediately and without precondition” is facetious.
I agree with not selling weapons to known maniacs, but I also believe that if the govt knows someone’s dangerous enough that they shouldn’t own a gun for self defense, they already should have been removed from the general population and arrested/imprisoned etc, as they are still very dangerous to the general population without said firearm.
Why do you think law abiding citizens should be gassed, arrested and shot at for exercising their constitutional right to petition the government against grievances? Because Trump sure enjoyed doing those things and he says he’s going to do it even more if he gets re-elected. And then there’s the Republican love of cruel and unusual punishments. And, of course, there’s Mike Johnson and other Republicans denying that there is or should be a separation between church and state.
Seems like maybe the people who are supposed to protect your constitutional right to own a gun don’t really care about other constitutional rights.
What a lot of whataboutism. I’m against all of that, too, but I can also be against limits on my rights of self defense.
Now you see the crux of the issue it seems, on either side someone is attacking the right to something, there is no champion of all rights, everyone wants to control their neighbor.
Because it makes the world safer. Same reason you need a fence around a pool, even though the pursuit of happiness is protected by the constitution (for me, happiness is unbridled access to a pool).
Oh so you have no idea what you’re talking about and have no business publically sharing opinions on this, or really any aspect of the Constitution. You simply don’t have the requisite knowledge to be credible.
Same way as law abiding citizens need to wait 21 years, goes through firearm training, and gone through background check to exercise their constitutional rights. If 30 days is such a long time to wait and considered unconstitutional, why not lower the age requirement to 12 years old? Why need firearm training? Why need background check?
This a stupid argument. The right isn’t to just have guns.
It’s to have guns whilst being a member of a militia that trains regularly and only for the purpose of protecting state security.
That’s literally what the text says.
All that extra shit you are adding to the right is stuff made up by charlatans. And I guess it worked, because they sure fooled you.
Have you read the constitution? It literally does not say it’s only for the purpose of protecting the state
The problem with the world today is that we have illiterates like you voting.
You can wait, bud. In OR it’s already a ~2 week wait to pick one up from an FFL, it didn’t affect me in the slightest. It’s clear we need more in-depth preprocessing before granting weapon ownership. It’s a deadly item, just like a car is. You gotta register and have a license and all this shit before you can hit the road. Whats the diff?
Also, you actually have to wait to exercise lots of constitutional rights. What you gonna advocate for voting whenever the fuck you want? It’s our constitutional right after all!
The issue you should have with any of this is with licensing it likely puts a financial barrier to that same constitutional right.
The car argument is not good. Anyone can buy and operate a car immediately on private property without any interference from government in the US.
I think SCOTUS might reverse that. I don’t think there was any recent case concerning waiting periods.
It’s not the waiting period that’s the problem, it’s the permit to attempt to buy.
There’s already a background check when you buy, these states were requiring a second background check before you buy. Pointless paperwork.
Maryland also required fingerprints, which is a huge hassle and will likely cause the law to stay invalidated. It costs money, and requires you to go to a jail or sheriffs office, which is only open from 9-4 with lunch blocked from 11:30-1:30.
SCOTUS has held that permitting is fine with Bruen, though, as long as it doesn’t involve subjective “suitability” criteria, which is my point.
They had gun control in the “Wild West.” Many towns didn’t allow guns within the borders. But even that era that Republicans love so much had too much regulation for them.
Oregon’s law was terrible and needed to be overturned ASAP. It basically gave sherriffs, the most ulta-conservative people in the state, the power to decide who did and didn’t get guns. The conspiracy minded part of me thinks measure 114 was put on the ballot to set gun control efforts back by 6 to 8 years, and it succeeded.
It was written and proposed by an ultra religious movement too… You can be tax free or take positions in governing. Pick one.
You may now all exercise your right to ARM THE FUCK UP BECAUSE NAZIS ARE COMING TO KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.
The only violent nazis intent on killing people I’ve seen lately are the ones chanting “From the river to the sea…”
You mean Hamas? By using human shields and by conducting military operations, launching rockets, and storing weapons near or in schools, hospitals, mosques, and other civilian infrastructure, they are the ones who are responsible for those deaths.
As a gun owner myself, I support the licensing, the high capacity mags ban won’t do a damn thing though. If you’ve ever seen a 10rd 556 mag it’s small as hell and you can stuff lots in pockets and such. It won’t stop a damn thing, especially with coward cops who just listen to the action and do nothing.
if that’s what it takes then fine but why can’t we come up with shit that actually makes sense instead of these ‘whatever we can get’ stuff. I realize republican trash makes that nigh impossible though. Fucking dumb as hell
Because other developed countries are just that… developed…they have safety nets, and single payer healthcare…and don’t lock up millions of people…they also don’t have and have never had 500+ million firearms in civilian hands.
All we need to do is severely restrict ammo sales to individuals. Guns are useless without rounds.
As long as people have near unlimited access to ammo, they’ll always find a different gun or magazine to use that gets around certain gun bans.
The real gun nuts invest heavily in ammo manufacturing and reloading. And not all states will comply.
“Poor people don’t deserve the right to self defense, but if you’re rich enough you should be able to shoot up whatever you can afford.”
That’s how it already is? Rich people have always been able to afford more than the poor. How is that relevant to what I said?
If we restrict ammo sales to everyone then the rich won’t be allowed to have more than the poor.
For self defense, nobody needs more than a single magazine of rounds. If you’re using more than that, you’re being careless and dangerous and you’re a poor shot.
I also support licensing as a gun owner, but banning anything isn’t going to do a damn thing. There’s so much pointless semantics in these gun control proposals.
Putting words in my mouth? I never said anything about abortion. But fwiw, I’m against banning abortion too. I hate how everyone assumes I’m a braindead conservative when I give the slightest hint that I’m pro-gun (even sensibly).
