imported post
sudden valley gunner wrote:
Make Seattle pay for hundreds of Public Defense Lawyers. The state already has an opinion on this, Seattle is ignoring it. And this is also the thing that government has been relying on make illegal laws and people won't fight it because it will cost them. In my opinion the members of Open Carry have done more in a short period of time to fight and get our rights recognized than NRA or SAF has in many many years.
On the issue of *specifically* open carry, yes, I would agree with you on that particular score, SVG.
However, I might point out that NRA and SAF/CCRKBA were doing their best with a horrific situation where a majority of the federal court circuits were saying the 2A was a collective right, and their only way of "holding the fort" is via the Legislatures and Congress, or via egregious cases where gun owners' 4th and 5th amendment was violated,
vis a vis the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was SAF and the NRA who challenged dishonest law professors and scholars who kept repeating the "collective right" lie. Other law professors followed their lead and the cascading conversation over the decades got a large majority to recognize that "collective rights" was total bull@#$%, based on a briefing by the feds in
United States v. Miller in 1939. After the feds won, folks who supported NFA started spewing the same crap and then started finding out of context statements by the Founders to justify the "collective rights" crap.
Without that being done, there would have been no
Heller.
The NRA was very effective getting every city in the Chicagoland region save Chicago itself and Oak Park to repeal their complete handgun bans. The NRA (along with SAF) been very effective in getting San Francisco's Proposition H taken down under the state's preemption statute.
SAF is partner in the case of
McDonald v. City of Chicago, which was taken up rather than the NRA case due to P&I, and has the possible significance of applying the entirety of the BoR to the states.
SAF is also partnered in three other cases, which is
Palmer v. District of Columbia against DC's carry ban,
Sykes v. McGinness against a California CLEO's refusal to accept self defense as good cause, and Hodgkins v. Holder against the "You must be a resident of a state to buy a gun" provision against two natural born US citizens who are residing in the UK and Canada (think about the implications of what a win of this will do for us).
SAF also filed the last preemption case against a city here in Washington in
Second Amendment Foundation v. City of Renton. SAF lost in the appeals court, however the Legislature heard loud and clear from Washington gun owners that the current situation of allowing cities to pass gun bans was unacceptable, to the point that even Governor Booth Gardner (D) signed the current preemption statute into law in 1985.
Not every battle that SAF/CCRKBA and NRA fights is out in the open for everyone to see, especially in the era before the internet became really popular and there's not much in the way of knowledge of that era.
I think we, as gun owners, have a pretty good shot at defeating the Seattle gun ban in state court, and possibly federal when
McDonald comes down the pike. If that doesn't work, however, then we need a plan B, which is to push the Legislature to strengthen the preemption statute even further, perhaps to using Utah's preemption statute as a template.
1997's I-676 proved that you don't piss gun owners off in this state.
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