With government at all levels out of control, the last two years have been extremely busy for our firm. We were involved with several cases that we have not yet reported on in our firm emails, and one of those was an important firearms case - Jackson v. San Francisco.

Our involvement with the case began last year, the day before the Fourth of July, 2014, when our firm filed an amicus brief to uphold gun rights in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in support of a Petition for Rehearing En Banc, in the case. That petition was denied on July 17, 2014 by the Ninth Circuit.

The Western Journalism Center carried our article about that brief.

Then we filed a second amicus brief in support of the petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court on January 15, 2015. Unfortunately, that petition was denied on June 8, 2015. The reason that this case is important is that two Supreme Court Justices - Justices Thomas and Scalia - issued a dissent from the Court's denial of certiorari, which we have cited in other cases since then.

Dissents from denials of certiorari are reasonably rare, and what these Justices appear to be doing is expressing frustration that the lower federal courts are exhibiting hostility to the Heller majority decision, and instead favoring the Breyer dissent. Here is part of what Justices Thomas and Scalia had to say:

"The decision of the Court of Appeals is in serious tension with Heller....

"Since our decision in Heller, members of the Courts of Appeals have disagreed about whether and to what extent the tiers-of-scrutiny analysis should apply to burdens on Second Amendment rights. Compare Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F.3d 1244 (CADC 2011) ("We ask first whether a particular provision impinges upon a right protected by the Second Amendment; if it does, then we go on to determine whether the provision passes muster under the appropriate level of constitutional scrutiny"), with id., at 1271 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting) ("In my view, Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny"). One need not resolve that dispute to know that something was seriously amiss in the decision below. In that decision, the Court of Appeals recognized that the law "burdens the core of the Second Amendment right," yet concluded that, because the law's burden was not as "severe" as the one at issue in Heller, it was "not a substantial burden on the Second Amendment right itself." 746 F.3d, at 963-965. But nothing in our decision in Heller suggested that a law must rise to the level of the absolute prohibition at issue in that case to constitute a "substantial burden" on the core of the Second Amendment right. And when a law burdens a constitutionally protected right, we have generally required a higher showing than the Court of Appeals demanded here. See generally Heller, 554 U.S., at 628-635; Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 662 (1994) (explaining that even intermediate scrutiny requires that a regulation not "burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government's legitimate interests" (internal quotation marks omitted))....

"We warned in Heller that "[a] constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all." 554 U.S., at 634. The Court of Appeals in this case recognized that San Francisco's law burdened the core component of the Second Amendment guarantee, yet upheld the law. Because of the importance of the constitutional right at stake and the questionable nature of the Court of Appeals' judgment, I would have granted a writ of certiorari."

Our two briefs were filed on behalf of Gun Owners of America, Inc., Gun Owners Foundation, U.S. Justice Foundation, The Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, The Abraham Lincoln Foundation for Public Policy Research, Institute on the Constitution, Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Policy Analysis Center.