If it is licensed, it is a privilege and not a right. If it is a privilege, then it is reasonable to limit the privilege to citizens.
The problem is not that licenses are not issued to non-citizens legally in the country. The problem is that there is no unlicensed form of carry in MA for all those allowed to possess a firearm.
These battles to win the oxymoronic right to be licensed are just plain silly. Fight for the right, not for the privilege.
Actually, they are not silly. The path that's being followed by Comm2A in this case, with the carry cases that have been filed throughout the country, is a tried and tested method of expanding civil rights that have been brutally suppressed.
I urge you to read the transcript for
"The Road to Brown"
Start with Title 3 and Title 4. Houston didn't go for taking on all school segregation first. They went around the edges first to destroy the "equal" part of things, and then separate became untenable.
Also, the Jehovah's Witnesses also followed the similar path to greater first amendment freedom.
We are following the same path as the Houston/Marshall/Jehovah's Witnesses Civil Rights Litigation Era, on an accelerated timetable. It took 24 years for Brown to come to fruition. Now there are numerous connected activists that exist now who can push that timetable in an accelerated fashion.
8 years ago, a case that was specifically being shaped for a SCOTUS review was
Silveira v. Lockyer. The Silveira v. Lockyer case was a California Assault Weapons ban case. The gun activist community was in two camps: The Silveira-camp and the Anti-Silveira Camp. The pro-Silveira camp made many of the arguments you did, that going directly after the ban on "assault weapons". The Anti-Silveira camp (many of who were called ineffective and even treacherous to 2A), surmised correctly that Silveira would not be taken up, and if it did, we would have lost the individual right via a 5-4 or even worse ruling.
This was brought up by Don Kates' article,
Silveira: Second Amendment Suicide.
To quote him specifically (and yes, Kates does give permission to freely post his work with attribution):
There are two quite different ideas that are expressed by people who think we should want to have the Supreme Court review Silveira. There are some who naively believe that all we need is one big Supreme Court victory and gun control will go away forever. That is not the way constitutional litigation works at all.
The way it actually works is illustrated by the Jehovah's Witnesses cases of the 1930s and 1940s. In those days the JWs were subject to enormous antagonism because they are pacifists and reject anything they interpret as idolatry to the state. This includes JW schoolchildren refusing to salute the flag, recite the pledge of allegiance, etc. All kinds of laws and police practices were directed against them. They brought not one case but a series of cases to the Supreme Court; and those cases established our modern doctrines of freedom of religion. The first victorious case was a vital first step, but had they only brought that case they would still have been subject to endless harassment under laws that differed from the one that first victorious case overthrew.
In sum, it is hopelessly unsophisticated to believe that one Supreme Court victory is going to make gun control go away. What is needed is one really strong first case, followed by another, followed by another, followed by another, followed by another, followed by another, and so on. With the constitutional law thus established we can go on to apply it ever more expansively.
In contrast to the Unsophisticated View, the Wrong View acknowledges that it will take multiple decisions to establish our Second Amendment rights. But its proponents see making an "assault weapon" case like Silveira the first Second Amendment case decided by the Court as a shortcut. They believe (all-too-rightly) that if the Supreme Court will invalidate an AW ban, it will invalidate virtually any other gun control. The problem is that the converse is far more likely: If the Court is given an AW case first, it is very unlikely to decide the case our way and its decision will doom other challenges to other kinds of gun control.
As far as today's judiciary is concerned, AWs are like land mines – things no decent, sane civilian has any reason to own or would want to own. And if their first crack at the right to arms is an AW case they are very likely to decide that there is no such right.
more:
The anti-gun lobby has used its falsified hysteria over AWs to incredible advantage. Vast numbers of people, including judges, who recognize the right to choose to keep a handgun in your house for self-defense regard owning an AW as only slightly less looney than insisting you need a bazooka to resist burglars or home invasion robbers.
I am not saying that AW bans can never be overturned under the Second Amendment. But that will only come after a solid basis of Second Amendment law has been established by many prior Supreme Court cases. Leading with an AW case is like "leading with your jaw." It is Second Amendment suicide.
He was, and is right.
While the bruhaha was going on over Silveira, another much less known case was winding it's way through the district court, which was Parker v. District of Columbia. Parker was a collection of 6 plaintiffs who sued against two specific laws: The inability to register a handgun after the date the registry "closed", and the ability to have a loaded handgun in the home for self defense, as this was banned by both a trigger lock requirement and the ban on carry in the home without a license to carry.
By limiting the subject matter to "Is there a right to have a handgun in the home and to have it loaded and being able to carry for self defense", rather than quibbling over if licensing or registration was appropriate, we were able to get the "first" case a surprisingly guiding ruling on the issue. This of course, led to McDonald, applying what became Heller to the states, which led to all of the carry cases, the NYC fees case that was just filed by SAF, the ban on out of state gun purchasing with Dearth v. Holder, cases filed against safe gun registries, and the Comm2A litigation here.
We'll go after registration and licensing once all of the right steps have been taken. Take out the fees for registration and licensing, and we'll make it un-affordable for the state to bear the burden of registration. This will eliminate nearly all but the most hardcore crazy of the anti-gun jurisdictions, and going after them for the final prize of annihilating prior restraint on our 2A will be cake with all of the previous case law that has been developed.