America has far too much casual patriotism that asserts arbitrary and capricious rights of immigrant or firearms sanctuaries for me but not for thee.
Missouri has a militia which when looking closer is essentially National Guard redundancy, largely for civil emergencies like natural rather than cultural disasters such as defending Missouri from a military invasion by Kansas, Illinois, Arkansas, or Iowa. Fining state or local officials for enforcing a federal gun law that is not a state law raises the usual problem of enumerated or unenumerated rights and applies a $50,000 fine. Darn that supremacy clause.
Can it really be that a “(Second Amendment Protection Act) gives felons the right to own guns. It allows citizens from Missouri the right to sue law enforcement for 50,000 dollars for violating state gun laws. Hundreds of Missouri police chiefs and sheriffs object to the law.” Should lawfare or even mayhem be the social cost of such conflict. Like voting and sentencing, more uniformity is necessary.
President Joe Biden's Justice Department is stepping up its fight against a new state law in Missouri ("Second Amendment Protection Act") that aims to invalidate many federal gun regulations, saying the measure has impeded law enforcement efforts to work with state and local police and is also unconstitutional. On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest in an ongoing lawsuit in Cole County, Missouri
The Second Amendment Preservation Act, which went into effect in August, is considered among the most wide-reaching gun rights bills in the United States. The law, passed by the state’s GOP-led legislature and signed by the Republican governor, allows private citizens to sue local jurisdictions or governments for $50,000 if they believe their Second Amendment rights have been violated.
In a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Kansas City, Mo., the Justice Department argues that the law is unconstitutional because it attempts to supersede federal law. The Missouri law rules that federal gun measures that don’t have an equivalent in state law are “invalid.” Some federal measures covered in the state law involve weapons registration and tracking, as well as gun possession by some domestic-violence offenders.
“This act impedes criminal law enforcement operations in Missouri,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The United States will work to ensure that our state and local law enforcement partners are not penalized for doing their jobs to keep our communities safe.”
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The litigation against Missouri comes at a time when gun laws and bills in the Show Me State have faced public scrutiny. A bill recently proposed by a Republican lawmaker would alter self-defense laws in the state and establish that any use of “physical or deadly force” would be presumed to be self-defense. The bill has won support from Republicans and supporters such as Mark McCloskey, an attorney who gained national attention after he and his wife pointed firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home in St. Louis in 2020. While proponents say the bill would shield citizens from unfair prosecution, critics have decried the proposal as the “Make Murder Legal Act.”
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“The Missouri law has had a harmful impact on public safety efforts within the state,” the agency stated in the lawsuit. “Critical information that state and local offices previously shared with federal law enforcement officers to facilitate public safety and law enforcement is now frequently unavailable to federal law enforcement agencies in the same manner.”
A separate state lawsuit seeking to overturn the law is still pending in Missouri Supreme Court after oral arguments were heard this month. It’s unclear when the state could rule in that lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis and St. Louis and Jackson counties.
Missouri Republicans have repeatedly stated the law does not prohibit federal officers from doing their job. But the Justice Department complaint alleges the Missouri law violates the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution.
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II Amendment
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
IX Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
X Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Missouri is one of fourteen states with some form of Second Amendment Sanctuary declaration. As the headline on the graphic says, 60% of U.S. counties are either sanctuaries themselves or are in sanctuary states.
Because musket (and cannon) owners needed to be able to stand against armies of musket-wielding (and cannon wielding) government entities.
While many defenders of private gun ownership recognize that the Second Amendment was written to provide some sort of counterbalance against the coercive power of the state, this argument is often left far too vague to reflect an accurate view of this historical context surrounding the Amendment.
After all, it is frequently pointed out that private ownership of shotguns and semi-automatic rifles could offer only very limited resistance to the extremely well-equipped and well-armed United States military.
It is often, therefore, just assumed that the writers of the Second Amendment were naïve and incapable of seeing the vast asymmetries that would develop between military weaponry and the sort of weaponry the average person was likely to use.
Was the plan really to just have unorganized amateurs grab their rifles and repel the invasion of a well-trained military force?(1)
The answer is no, and we know this by looking at the wording and reasoning behind the Second Amendment. The text, of course, reads “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Gun-rights advocates often fixate on the second half of the amendment, claiming that the phrase about a militia is just something that provides a reasoning for the second phrase. Many opponents of gun control even suggest that the only phrase here of key importance is “shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment as a Guard Against a Standing Army
Looking at the debates surrounding the Second Amendment and military power at the end of the eighteenth century, however, we find that the authors of the Second Amendment had a more sophisticated vision of gun ownership than is often assumed.
Fearful that a large federal military could be used to destroy the freedoms of the states themselves, Anti-Federalists and other Americans fearful of centralized power in the US government designed the Second Amendment accordingly. It was designed to guarantee that the states would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power, and as a means of keeping a defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government.
tenthamendmentcenter.com/…
A New Civil War in America? The New Yorker Radio Hour
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