The Office of Civil Rights under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon says that the right to keep and bear arms is not a second-class right — and the time has come for states and localities to stop treating it as such.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon announced last week that the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has opened a new section dedicated to defending and enforcing the Second Amendment, saying that the right to keep and bear arms is not a second-class right.
She noted that the Supreme Court has clearly reaffirmed citizens’ right to carry commonly used firearms in recent decisions. These include District of Columbia v. Heller and New York State Pistol & Rifle Association v. Bruen.
In the latter case, the Supreme Court ruled that New York’s oppressive licensing regime, which required citizens to go through an arbitrary process that included proving to bureaucrats their need to carry a firearm, violated the Second Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, stated,
“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right,’ subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees. We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”
And Dhillon says that she and Attorney General Pam Bondi have already joined a number of existing challenges to gun restrictions, among them Illinois’s ban on so-called assault weapons and Hawaii’s ban on carrying firearms outside a person’s home.
In the latter case, Hawaii’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s law, claiming that Hawaii’s history, state law, and “spirit” overruled the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision. That ruling has since been overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. However, the state of Hawaii appealed it to the Supreme Court, which has since agreed to take up the case, with a ruling on it expected by early summer.
Dhillon told host of Human Events Jack Posobiec that her office is planning additional cases against unconstitutional restrictions on the Second Amendment in states and cities around the nation.
She named several illegal rules that are already being targeted. Several states, for example, charge thousands of dollars to apply for a concealed carry permit, while Washington, D.C., bans women with concealed carry permits from keeping their weapons in their purse.
The patchwork of laws creates a situation in which a law-abiding citizen could have a permit in one jurisdiction but would be in violation of state or local laws simply by traveling into another jurisdiction.
In response, Dhillon promised,
“Expect a lot of activity from the Second Amendment section, and a lot of commitment from this DOJ to eliminating unnecessary state laws that interfere with this fundamental right of law-abiding citizens to carry and bear and use arms.”
While Bruen should have been a landmark decision that should have caused all 50 states to automatically to review and eliminate unconstitutional gun restrictions, it has instead been used by blue states and cities to try to flex their muscles and push the boundaries set by it.
Many of these jurisdictions have chosen to utilize “sensitive place” restrictions, which bar carrying a firearm in certain areas, but some have defined virtually any area outside of a person’s home as a sensitive place, which, in practice, effectively eliminates the right to carry a gun.
Other blue states, like Hawaii, have openly defied the Supreme Court and claim that the highest court in the nation was wrong in its decision.
A case in point is New York City, which rather than learning from its defeat at the Supreme Court, has only doubled down on it.
In November, 67-year-old Charles Foehner took a plea deal that will land him in prison for four years, all for carrying an unlicensed gun that may have saved his life.
Foehner was carrying a revolver when the Queens resident was attacked by Cody Gonzalez, who attempted to rob him at 2 a.m. outside his home.
Gonzalez ran at Foehner with a pen, which looked like a knife to Foehner in the moment.
The victim brandished the revolver, which he had started carrying due to rising crime in New York City, but Gonzalez continued his charge. Foehner fired, killing Gonzalez.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office did not charge Foehner for Gonzalez’s death as it was determined that the senior citizen had acted in self-defense; however, Foehner was charged with crimes associated with carrying the gun and having other firearms inside of his home. Gonzalez, meanwhile, had been out on the streets despite having been arrested 15 times prior to the attempted robbery on Foehner.
Because the state’s charges carried a possible 25-year prison sentence, Foehner agreed to plead guilty to one count of criminal weapons possession.
His lawyer, Thomas Kenniff, who successfully defended former Marine Daniel Penny, blasted New York City’s “draconian” gun laws that make it arduous, if not impossible, for law-abiding citizens to legally obtain a weapon of any kind, stating,
“If we respected people’s constitutional right and provided practical means for citizens to exercise that right, Mr. Foehner would not be in the position he is in today.”
The DA’s office attempted to have Foehner locked up in prison before his official sentencing, but a judge will allow him to spend Christmas at home.
For court rulings to be binding and respected, the executive branch must enforce the law — even, and especially, when states and localities refuse to abide by those rulings.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools based on race were unconstitutional, Democrat-led states ignored it and then undermined other efforts by those trying to follow the law. This recalcitrance forced a number of legal actions. In the most extreme example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower moved to override Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and deploying the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne to enforce a local court order to desegregate Central High School board in Little Rock.
Democrat-led states and cities are being similarly defiant and have made it plain that they will not uphold the Second Amendment rights of citizens unless they are forced to do so.
Their strategy has been to portray their laws as “common sense,” but what they really intend to do is make it illegal for a person to carry any firearm outside of their home. They also work to redefine commonly used firearms, like the semi-automatic AR-15, as military-grade weapons that fall into the same category as a machine gun.
In the meantime, their soft-on-crime policies allow the predictable violence that makes carrying a gun for self-defense so necessary for law-abiding citizens.
If Charles Foehner had not had a revolver when he was attacked, he might be dead right now. Unfortunately, too many progressive politicians and local judges are opting to coddle criminals while using the full force of tyrannical and unconstitutional laws against law-abiding citizens.
The Second Amendment does not limit nor qualify a lawful person’s right to obtain and own firearms, a fact that the Supreme Court reaffirmed very clearly in Bruen. So now those states and cities that refuse to abide by the law of the land have reached the point where the federal government has no option left but to enforce the law against them. And Harmeet Dhillon has finally set up the mechanism to do just that.
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