On September 26, 2008, we filed on behalf of Gun Owners Foundation an amicus brief in United States v. Hayes.  The GOF brief urged the Supreme Court to affirm a Fourth Circuit court of appeals ruling that, as a matter of statutory interpretation, an individual does not lose the right to own a gun unless the prosecutor in the misdemeanor case  proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the misdemeanor event was, in fact, a domestic one.

Prior to the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Hayes, all the other courts of appeals (which had addressed the question) had decided the case the other way:  that the domestic aspect of the misdemeanor need not be proved in court, but need only appear somewhere, such as on a police report.  Thus, for a dozen years, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been deprived of their right to purchase or possess a firearm, not on the basis of a proven fact, but on the basis of an uncontested accusation.

The statute being contested was enacted in 1996 as part of a omnibus appropriations bill – the now infamous Lautenberg Amendment, named after its sponsor, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ).   This stealth provision prohibited, for the first time in the history of federal firearms regulation, a person from possessing a firearm if he had been convicted of a  misdemeanor, specifically a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.”

One of the defining differences between felonies and misdemeanors is that felons lose civil liberties (e.g., voting, serving on a jury, holding public office, gun ownership), while those who commit misdemeanors do not.  The Lautenberg amendment is a notable exception to this rule.

The GOF brief charges that, by its disregard for the language of the statute and its unjustified reliance upon Senator Lautenberg’s personal opinions, the Government unlawfully jeopardizes firearm ownership, by encouraging inaccurate and incomplete reporting of information on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and by creating an impermissible risk of self-incrimination on ATF Form 4473, completion of which is required of all purchasers of firearms from a federally licensed firearms dealer.

Today, on behalf of Gun Owners of American and Gun Owners Foundation, we filed comments opposing the United States Postal Service's "Proposed New Standards Prohibit the Mailing of Replica or Inert Munitions."  (See 73 Fed. Reg. 12321.)  The new rule proposes to declare nonmailable "[r]eplica or inert munitions."

The comments demonstrate that the proposed standard is unauthorized by law, and violative of the Postal Service's Universal Service Obligation.  Additionally, the comments show how the proposed new rule is vague and, as a consequence, could include all sorts of unintended items. 

Finally, the comments note how the proposed new rule appears to be driven by an attempt to standardize postal regulations among North American countries.

Today, the day after oral argument in the Heller case in which we filed an amicus brief, Herb Titus and Bill Olson were asked to write an op-ed piece for USA Today. 

The USA Today editors wrote an editorial entitled "Our View:  Preserve limits on guns" and our counterpoint is entitled "Opposing view:  An unambiguous right." 

Today, our firm filed an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court supporting the respondent in the D.C. gun ban case, District of Columbia, et. al., v. Dick Anthony Heller, No. 07-290. The brief was filed on behalf of Gun Owners of America, Inc., Gun Owners Foundation, Maryland Shall Issue, Inc., Virginia Citizens Defense League, Gun Owners of California, Inc., Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The issue in the case is whether three D.C. Code provisions violate a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for private use in one’s home. We argued that, under long-standing rules limiting its jurisdiction, the Court should not entertain the Solicitor General’s invitation to assess the constitutionality of the whole array of the current federal firearms statutes. Nor, in response to petitioners and the Solicitor General, should the Court craft a standard of review not supported by the text to permit “reasonable” gun control. Rather, the Court should apply a standard of review dictated by the words and principles embodied in the Second Amendment, as directed by America’s founders.

According to its text, context, and historic setting, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to private possession and use of handguns in one’s own home. The individual right to keep and bear arms is essential to a “well regulated militia” — a self-bodying, self-governing association of people privately trained to arms, modeled after the colonial militia that took up their privately-owned firearms to defeat a tyrannical effort to confiscate their arms. In turn, a “well regulated militia” ensures the preservation of a “free state” by allowing all members of the American polity to exercise, if necessary, the sovereign right of the “people” to reconstitute their government.

In order to ensure its purpose to preserve the people’s liberties, the Second Amendment bans discriminatory legislation against classes of persons that, by nature, are rightful members of “the people.” In order to ensure its means to defeat tyranny, the Second Amendment bans discriminatory legislation against firearms that are essential to preserve those liberties. By discriminating against law-abiding D.C. citizens and against handguns, the D.C. Code provisions violate both of these standards and, therefore, unconstitutionally infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

On behalf of TREA Senior Citizens League (“TSCL”), we filed comments with the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) in opposition to the FDA’s Science Board Report Entitled “FDA Science and Mission at Risk: Report of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology.”

The Report asserts that the FDA is in danger of not being able to perform its mission without a vast and unprecedented doubling of funding. The Report admits that Subcommittee was “not [asked] to assess available resources,” yet it nevertheless focused on the inadequacy of current funding. The Report claims that American lives already are at risk because of work that the FDA has been unable to do, and that nothing would change without additional funding.

The Report relies on “outside” sources with close ties to current and former board members, and in that way gives up much credibility. And because the Subcommittee chose this all-or-nothing approach, its Report is flawed having: (a) failed to set meaningful priorities, (b) drawn suspect conclusions, and (c) overstated the FDA’s need for additional resources.

The Report also fails to understand three factors which militate against the enhanced scientific and technological capacity that would result if the Report’s recommended increases in funding would be adopted.

First, the Report ignores the intractable fact that the FDA’s need for a “mission driven” science means that the agency will always lag behind the “cutting edge science.”

Second, the Report ignores that the administrative regulatory model is ill-suited to deal with the coming “paradigm shift ... that medicine will move progressively from the assessment of drug efficacy and safety based on large average effects detected in clinical trials” into a new “era of the personalization of medicine.”

Third, the Report fails to come to grips with the dangers posed to the privacy of individual medical records by an increasing centralization of government power in a single federal agency.

Moreover, if the Report’s findings and recommendations are flawed, as FDA Commissioner Andrew Von Eschenbach in Congressional testimony has suggested they are, then steps other than throwing money at the problem as proposed by the Report should be explored in order to protect the individual health needs of the American people.