McDaniel To Join Brief In Support Of Gun Rights

This story was just published online in the last hour or so by the Arkansas News Bureau and is a great demonstration of local politicians showing their support for the Second Amendment.

McDaniel To Join Brief In Support Of Gun Rights
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 9:18 AM CST
By John Lyon

Arkansas News Bureau • jlyon@arkansasnews.com

LITTLE ROCK — Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Tuesday he would join a brief to be filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of gun ownership rights for individuals.

The nation’s highest court has agreed to hear an appeal in a lawsuit challenging the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. McDaniel said his office would join a Texas brief arguing in favor of individuals’ gun rights.

“I believe the Second Amendment confers a constitutional right to bear arms on individuals, not just on militia members,” McDaniel said in a statement issued by his office. “It is a right that belongs to law-abiding Americans and it cannot be taken away by state, federal or local laws.”

The Texas attorney general’s office will be the primary author of the friend-of-the-court brief, but McDaniel’s staff will suggest revisions and additions, Chief Deputy Attorney General Justin Allen said. He said McDaniel, a former Jonesboro police officer, volunteered to assist Texas because of his strong belief in individuals’ rights to own guns.

McDaniel said he also would help in recruiting other attorneys general to sign on in opposition of D.C.’s gun control laws.

The District of Columbia’s 31-year-old gun law bars most individuals from owning handguns and requires other firearms to be kept unloaded, disassembled or on a trigger lock. With backing from the National Rifle Association, six residents of the district filed a lawsuit challenging the law, claiming it violated their constitutional right to own firearms.

After a federal judge dismissed the suit in January, the plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The appeals court threw out five of the plaintiffs for lack of standing but decided in favor of the remaining plaintiff, Dick Anthony Heller, ruling the D.C. law was unconstitutional.

Heller was the only plaintiff in the case who had applied for permission to keep a gun in his home and was turned down.

The U.S. Supreme Court said last week it would hear the case. The high court has never directly said whether the Second Amendment applies to people who are not members of state militias.

The Second Amendment states, “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.”

Doug Pennington, a spokesman for The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Tuesday the Washington-based pro-gun control group has no problem with state attorneys general — who are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution as well as their state constitutions and laws — taking positions on the Second Amendment.

The Brady Campaign supports the rights of cities and states to make their own gun laws.

“If you aren’t keeping and bearing arms in relation to the service of a well-regulated militia, then the Second Amendment doesn’t really enter into anything,” Pennington said. “It certainly doesn’t enter into whether or not a city or state can make its own law that it believes can keep it safe.”

Allen said McDaniel supports some restrictions on gun ownership, including waiting periods for gun purchases and prohibitions against felons owning firearms.

But “what the District of Columbia did here was very over-reaching and very prohibitive in the laws that they passed,” Allen said.

Gun rights became an issue during the attorney general’s race last year. Republican nominee Gunner DeLay criticized McDaniel, a Democrat, for assisting his father, Jonesboro attorney Bobby McDaniel, in suing gun maker Remington Arms after four students and a teacher were killed in the 1998 Jonesboro school shootings.

Responding to DeLay’s criticism, McDaniel said in August 2006, “I am pro-Second Amendment, and my idea of gun control is using both hands to aim.”