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This is what I would call a 2A coalition of the willing. Willing to defend the Second Amendment and our rights under it. You have state groups that are affiliated with the NRA and state groups that are independent. You have a group that represents gun dealers. You have a couple of Second Amendment legal foundations. You have a group that advocates for the right of LGBTQ individuals to protect themselves. And you have the National Rifle Association.
They have come together to file an amicus curiae brief in support of Jason Wolford and his fellow petitioners as they seek a writ of certiorari to the US Supreme Court. This is the same case that the United States has filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners who are challenging a Hawaii law that permits carry only on private premises that are explicit in allowing it. The Hawaii law is a challenge to the Bruen decision which said it was legal to be armed in public including on private premises. Traditionally, carry is curtailed on private property in which the owners post against it and not as the 180 degree approach of Hawaii.
This amicus curiae brief makes two major arguments. First, that the Hawaii law was invented to undermine the Bruen decision. Second, that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals misread historical precedents and relied upon outliers including a “black code” law from post-Civil War Louisiana.
The genesis of the panel’s second purported historical analogue is downright repugnant. After the Civil War, defeated Confederate states sought to enact racial apartheid. One such enactment was the 1865 Louisiana law on which the panel relied. As another court recognized in discussing this very law, Louisiana “created these laws as part of their discriminatory ‘Black Codes,’ which sought to deprive African Americans of their rights.” Kipke v. Moore, 695 F. Supp. 3d 638, 659 (D. Md. 2023) (citing McDonald
v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 850 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment)). The law was never
intended to be enforced against White residents.
I am greatly heartened to see these organizations working in concert on pro-Second Amendment litigation. I am especially pleased to see the NRA-ILA participating as it had gone its own way in past years and would have never cooperated with other groups like this in the Wayne LaPierre years.
Now it is time to extend this same level of cooperation to pro-Second Amendment legislation. It can’t come too soon.
