President Donald Trump has done more for the Second Amendment than any other president in my lifetime, if not in all of American history. If it sounds like adoration or praise, though, we need to understand that the bar was so damn low that you could pole vault it with a toothpick. He’s done some legitimately good things, and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has been an absolute champion, taking on terrible laws at the state and local level.
Dhillon, via her job as head of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, has gone after a number of problematic gun control laws, and she’s likely to win those. The problem is, as this editorial points out, that the rest of the Department of Justice doesn’t seem to be on the same page.
The legal hook for the Justice Department’s involvement in these cases is a federal law that authorizes the attorney general to seek civil remedies for a law enforcement “pattern or practice of conduct” that deprives people of their constitutional or statutory rights. “The Constitution is not a suggestion,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week, “and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
The Justice Department nevertheless maintains that the Second Amendment does not apply to broad categories of Americans who are barred from owning firearms based on criteria that have little or nothing to do with public safety. The Trump administration has defended the Gun Control Act’s ban on firearm possession by “unlawful” drug users, which is at the center of a case that the Supreme Court will soon decide, and that law’s disarmament of people with nonviolent felony records, which has generated many petitions that the justices so far have declined to accept.
Both of those controversies pit the Trump administration against the National Rifle Association and other leading gun rights groups. It is not hard to see why, since neither policy is supported by the sort of “historical tradition” that the Supreme Court has said is required to justify gun regulations.
The Justice Department insists that “the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.” Yet it argues that cannabis consumers and people convicted of nonviolent felonies are, in effect, second-class citizens.
Unlike the civil liberties guaranteed by other constitutional amendments, the Trump administration says, the right to arms can be revoked for arbitrary reasons. Contrary to Blanche’s rhetoric, that sure seems like a second-class right.
That’s because everyone who says it’s not a second-class right tends to be the people most treating it like one. In this case, the DOJ has continued to defend blatantly unconstitutional gun control laws and pretend that these are perfectly acceptable restrictions on a constitutionally protected right, and Blanche hasn’t changed that since he took the helm.
I can’t say that I was surprised that former Attorney General Pam Bondi took such a stance, since it was consistent with what she did in Florida as attorney general, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
And again, there’s a lack of consistency, but not just for gun rights in general.
For example, the case regarding unlawful drug use alluded to above? That’s US v Hemani, which involves a man found with a handgun and some marijuana. The Department of Justice is maintaining that marijuana users are particularly dangerous to the public and should not maintain possession of their gun rights.
The Trump administration also changed the designation of marijuana to a Schedule 3 controlled substance, meaning that it’s no longer subject to a blanket ban under federal law, with broader efforts at rescheduling it coming down the road.
Now, if marijuana users are that dangerous, why change the controlled substance schedule?
Look, I’m thankful for the wins we’ve gotten from the Trump administration. I’m supremely thankful for Harmeet Dhillon’s work so far. However, that doesn’t mean I’m going to just sit here and shut up instead of pointing out how there’s a lot more to be done.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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