This post is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” which includes Jake Charles’ post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment, and Robert Leider’s post Pretextually Eliminating the Right to Bear Arms through Gerrymandered Property Rules. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the […]
In a new article forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review, Cynthia Lee surveys the current state of the “initial aggressor” doctrine–under which an individual who initiates a violent confrontation loses the right to claim that he or she acted in self defense–and proposes several changes to the doctrine to discourage gun violence and ensure that […]
This is a guest post that is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” responding to Jake Charles’ earlier post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the coming weeks. When the Supreme Court required public school desegregation […]
On December 6, a federal judge in the District of Oregon denied a motion for a TRO and preliminary injunction of Oregon’s Ballot Measure 114, a ballot initiative that narrowly passed in the November election. Measure 114 enacts a permit-to-purchase requirement, mandates safety training, fingerprinting, and a criminal background check to obtain a gun permit, […]
On December 1, Judge Roger Benitez[1] of the Southern District of California ruled in Miller v. Bonta that a challenge by gun dealers and gun-rights advocacy groups to the fee-shifting provision in California’s new firearms law is not moot, and permitted the lawsuit to proceed. California passed S.B. 1327 on July 22. The law is […]
On June 29, only six days after the Supreme Court struck down a New York law requiring gun owners to show a special need to carry concealed handguns in public, New York officials filed two civil lawsuits against manufacturers of so-called “ghost guns.” The first lawsuit was filed by the state attorney general, Letitia James, […]
In the same vein as our SCOTUS Gun Watch reports, this post summarizes the results of two major gun-related initiatives that were on the ballot in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Iowa Amendment No. 1 Iowa voters considered a ballot initiative that would add the following provision to the state constitution: The right of the people to […]
On July 29, the House of Representatives passed the Assault Weapon Ban of 2022 (HR 1808). The bill would prohibit the sale, import, or possession of new “assault weapons” and large capacity magazines, as defined in the bill. The definition section includes not only features or components that bring a weapon under the ban, but […]
[This is a guest post based on a paper that was presented at the Center’s 2022 Firearms Law Works-In-Progress Workshop.] Initially, this paper started as a primarily empirical study of the relationship between waiting period restrictions and some outcome variables of interest like per capita suicide and homicide rates. Many states that have a waiting […]
After the frenzied activity of the past few weeks, the Supreme Court in now in summer recess. We’ll be doing these posts every other week, instead of every week, through the summer. We’re keeping an eye out for any major developments in the four cases that the Court GVR’ed following Bruen: Association of New Jersey […]
In the aftermath of tragic mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, a bipartisan committee introduced the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” (or BSCA) in the Senate on Tuesday, June 21. By week’s end, the bill had passed the Senate. The House of Representatives followed suit on Friday, and the bill was signed into […]
When gun manufacturers or dealers face civil liability for misuse of firearms, the liability costs eventually shift to investors (shareholders or owners), liability insurers, commercial lenders, or creditors (the debts they own now carry more risk), and indirectly to future customers, who may face price increases. Financial institutions (which I will call “banks,” though this […]
In recent years, some two dozen states have enacted laws requiring private property owners to allow employees, customers, and others to bring in guns or store them on their land and buildings. Variously known as “parking-lot laws” and “gun-at-work” laws, such regulations are a serious violation of property rights. In many cases, they may also […]
A three judge panel of the Fifth Circuit upheld the federal bump stock ban yesterday. In a post last Wednesday, I noted how the Sixth Circuit en banc had split evenly on the legality of the bump stock ban, leaving in place the trial court’s decision upholding the regulation. The question doesn’t appear to be […]
As I mentioned earlier this week, the en banc Sixth Circuit failed to reach consensus on the legality of the Trump Administration’s ban on bump stock devices, which convert semi-automatic firearms into weapons that can approximate the rate of fire of an automatic firearm. (If you’re unfamiliar with the operation of bump stocks, I’ve found […]
Last week, in Barris v. Stroud Township, a divided intermediate appellate court in Pennsylvania invalidated a local ordinance restricting firearm discharge in the city outside recognized exceptions. That ordinance, citing “the density of the population in the Township of Stroud” found it “necessary that the discharging of firearms be regulated for the protection of the […]
In a break with other circuits, on March 25 the Sixth Circuit issued a decision in Gun Owners of America v. Garland, holding that the ATF’s 2019 ban on bump stocks is invalid. Previously, the DC Circuit and the Tenth Circuit have upheld the ban (more precisely, have rejected preliminary injunctions with opinions that effectively […]
