Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Second Amendment Task Force that will look for and litigate any abuses of our right to keep and bear arms is a huge important step of historical significance. Her announcement means that for the first time since the Heller decision was handed down, the Justice Department will be actively engaged in defense of our Second Amendment rights.
The first target of the DOJ is the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which is currently under investigation over the lengthy delays in processing concealed carry permits. But the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (where, in full disclosure, I serve as an unpaid member of the board of directors) has given Bondi and the 2A Task Force a list of a “dirty dozen” states where they should be focusing their efforts.
In his letter to Bondi, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb writes, “I would like to suggest that among the Task Force’s priorities might be to examine the patterns of egregious Second Amendment violations in the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. All of these states have adopted laws in recent years which have essentially relegated Second Amendment rights to the level of government-regulated privileges.”
“The time has come,” Gottlieb said, “to put the anti-rights leadership in these states on notice that their crusade to destroy the individual rights protected by the Second Amendment is finished. On behalf of our members and supporters, we’re hopeful Attorney General Bondi brings the full force of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division against these Draconian gun control laws wherever they have been enacted.
“In our opinion, special attention should be paid to Washington, Oregon and California,” he observed, “where lawmakers have been essentially working off an agenda set by the gun prohibition lobby. Such impediments as requiring permits to purchase in order to exercise a fundamental right, creating large areas where the legal carrying of firearms is prohibited, mandatory training and testing—which is tantamount to a literacy test—are deliberate impairments created to discourage citizens from exercising their rights.
If we wanted to make it a full baker’s dozen of bad actors I’d include the District of Columbia in the CCRKA’s list, but I have no complaints with the states that Gottlieb highlighted in his letter to Bondi. Yes, states like Maine, Minnesota, and Vermont have also adopted new gun control measures in recent years, but the lion’s share of the anti-gun agenda these days can be found in the states that Gottlieb mentioned.
Even if Bondi and the task force confine their investigations into the 12 states noted above, they could easily be overwhelmed with the number of infringements that are taking place. California alone could provide the basis for multiple investigations into things like the high cost of carry permits in some jurisdictions, the state’s ban on gun shows on government property, and local ordinances that (among other things) impose insurance mandates or use zoning laws to block gun shops from opening up within the city limits.
While the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is providing a starting point for the task force, the Firearms Policy Coalition recently released its own wish list for the Trump administration on 2A issues. We’ll be talking with FPC Action Foundation president Cody J. Wisniewski about those specific agenda items, which includes a dedicated group of attorneys in the DOJ Civil Rights Division that would focused on violations of our First and Second Amendment rights, on Tuesday’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, and Gottlieb will be back on the show before long as well to discuss some of the ongoing attacks on the right to keep and bear arms that we’re seeing from the Dirty Dozen infringers on our fundamental liberties.
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