[This guest post by Bernard Bell was originally published on the Notice & Comment blog and is cross-posted there.] Last week, by a complaint captioned Smith & Wesson v. Grewal, the firearms manufacturer sued New Jersey’s Attorney General in federal court to contest an administrative subpoena regarding its advertising practices.[1] Smith & Wesson sought to enjoin (1) […]
As I wrote about earlier this week, there’s been a lot of recent action around Michigan’s new restrictions on carrying firearms into polling places. Although the legal challenge was not framed in Second Amendment terms, the individuals and gun-rights advocacy groups who brought the lawsuit presented the case as a conflict between their right to […]
On October 16, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a memo in her capacity as “chief election officer with supervisory control over local election officials in the performance of their duties.” In that memo, Benson “clarif[ied]” that open carrying of firearms at or within 100 feet of a polling place is prohibited. The directive […]
In 2013, Colorado passed into law a new gun regulation that prohibits the sale, transfer, or possession of large-capacity magazines (LCMs) acquired after July 1, 2013. The law defines LCMs as those ammunition feeding devices that accept more than 15 rounds. A group of gun owners and gun-rights organizations challenged the law as a violation […]
There’s been a lot litigation over emergency orders and gun rights in the weeks since we’ve last tackled the issues on this blog. A lot of that litigation dropped off as states that faced the initial wave of lawsuits, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, modified their orders without any court direction. In fact, Pennsylvania changed […]
After the Supreme Court refused to halt a state tort claim by Sandy Hook plaintiffs against a gun manufacturer last November, debate over tort liability for gunmakers and sellers is getting a lot of attention, with experts increasingly weighing in on these types of lawsuits. To help inform the public, the Center is hosting a […]
A previous post explained how Steven Leroy Snyder failed his firearm purchase background checks on three occasions, but he passed the same background check when he renewed his concealed carry permit around the same time. He pursued both administrative remedies with the FBI to challenge the gun purchase denials and correct whatever inaccurate information was […]
A recent federal district court decision from Washington State, Snyder v. United States, highlights the complex interplay of gun rights and the background check bureaucracy. The October 30 decision brings together several areas of Administrative Law – judicial recourse (available relief) for adverse agency actions, cooperation and split responsibility between state and federal agencies, administrative […]
This case traces its beginnings to a nonprofit by the name of Defense Distributed. Defense Distributed’s avowed purpose is to facilitate “global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the three-dimensional (3D) printing of arms.” To that end, in 2013 the organization published computer aided design (CAD) data files that […]
In response to the horrific Las Vegas massacre, which left 58 dead and many more injured, the Trump Administration issued a Final Rule in December 2018 classifying bump stocks–the device the shooter used to inflict maximal carnage–as “machine guns” and thus banned under federal law. A group of individuals and entities who owned previously legal […]
