Gun owners in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota turned out in force at City Hall on Tuesday night as the Edina City Council took another step towards adopting a local gun control ordinance that squarely conflicts with the state’s firearm preemption law.
The city council was set to vote on the measure in mid-November, but Mayor James Hovland announced instead that the vote would be delayed until after a public hearing on the ordinance. That special town hall meeting took place on Tuesday night, with residents crowding the council chamber to voice their opposition or support.
Supporters argued the ordinance is a necessary step to improve public safety and prevent future tragedies. Others, however, voiced strong opposition.
“The proposed ordinance is not going to achieve that goal,” one opponent said during public comment. “It creates legal uncertainty, criminalizes responsible residents and diverts attention away from strategies that will actually reduce violence.”
Currently, Minnesota law does not allow cities to enforce their own gun regulations. However, some cities, including St. Paul, have passed ordinances that would only take effect if state law changes.
The Edina City Council said it will take up the issue at its next meeting in January.
The proposed ordinance would establish four new “prohibited acts” in the city; banning possession, manufacture, and sale of any “assault weapon, large capacity magazine, binary trigger, or ‘ghost gun'” along with a vague storage mandate prohibiting gun owners from storing a “loaded or unloaded firearm unattended in a ocation where the person knows or reasonably should know that an unauthorized person is likely to gain access to the firearm.”
Under the terms of the proposed ordinance, every day that a violation continues would be a misdemeanor offense subject to a jail term of up to 90 days and/or a $1,000 fine.
The city officials who are pushing the ordinance have received pushback from the Edina City Attorney and City Manager, both of whom have suggested that the proposed ordinance opens up the city to litigation, even though the ordinance states that it “shall not be effective or enforced until the date the City Council certifies by resolution that this Article is not preempted by state law.”
As MN Gun Owners Law Center head Rob Doar has argued, Minnesota’s preemption statute prohibits localities from adopting their own local gun control measures, regardless of whether or not they come with a “trigger” amendment delaying enforcement until preemption is repealed. The Law Center and MN Gun Owners Caucus has already sued the city of St. Paul over a similar ordinance adopted last fall, and most of the other cities that were part of an anti-gun alliance committed to adopting ordinances of their own have hit the pause button as a result of the litigation.
If the Edina City Council is smart, they’ll do the same. At best this proposed ordinance is an unenforceable bit of political theater, and defending it in court could waste hundreds of thousands of dollars. But as the unnamed opponent told council members, the ordinance is also not going to make Edina a safer place. It criminalizes legal gun ownership while doing nothing to address violent crime itself. Do supporters really believe that a violent predator or gang member is going to be stopped by an ordinance that creates a misdemeanor crime when they’re already willing to commit a felony offense?
This ordinance is targeted at legal gun owners and their Second Amendment rights, and as such it not only violates Minnesota’s preemption statute but our right to keep and bear arms as well. The City Council is set to take up the ordinance at its January 20 meeting, and hopefully by then the city’s gun owners and groups like the MN Gun Owners Caucus will have talked them out of supporting the unenforceable and unconstitutional ordinance being pushed by anti-gunners.
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.
Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun control policies and schemes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Read the full article here
