A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down Maryland’s handgun licensing law, finding that its requirements, which include submitting fingerprints for a background check and taking a four-hour firearms safety course, are unconstitutionally restrictive.
In a 2-1 ruling, judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said they considered the case in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that “effected a sea change in Second Amendment law.”
The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2016 as a challenge to a Maryland law requiring people to obtain a special license before purchasing a handgun. The law, which was passed in 2013 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, laid out a series of necessary steps for would-be gun purchasers: completing four hours of safety training that includes firing one live round, submitting fingerprints and passing a background check, being 21 and residing in Maryland.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said he was disappointed in the circuit court’s ruling and will “continue to fight for this law.” He said his administration is reviewing the ruling and considering its options.
Whatever helps you spoon your guns to sleep at night.
I sleep soundly at night, comfortable in the knowledge that your hoplophobic philosophy is on the decline; that the upcoming generations are much more likely to own guns than their parents and grandparents, thanks in large part to irrational fear mongering among educators.
I sleep soundly knowing that racially-motivated concealed-carry bans, originating in the former slave states shortly after the civil war, have been repealed, and most states have reverted to “constitutional carry”. Subsequent laws, like California’s/Reagan’s “Mulford Act”, (specifically designed to prevent civil rights advocates from being able to protect themselves and marginalized communities from abuse by racist cops), are under fire, and unlikely to survive pending legal challenges.
I sleep soundly knowing that US murder rates are a fraction of global rates, a fraction of the rates Inexperienced in my own youth, and near record lows. Most of the US is well below even European averages, despite our abysmal poverty controls, lack of healthcare, and systemic criminal justice issues. Our problems are effectively isolated to a relatively small number of ultra-violent communities and the occasional media-driven whack job.
I am thrilled that the people of Ohio just enshrined reproductive rights in our constitution. Further, we attacked the racially-motivated “war on drugs” with a referendum legalizing and regulating recreational marijuana.
Basically, pretty much everything is progressing nicely, despite your outdated, regressive position on guns.
Hopefully, you don’t scare enough people with your anti-gun rhetoric into voting for Trump.
It’s good of you to accidentally acknowledge that irrational fear is the number one seller of guns and they’d be decimated without it. How many do you own again?
But of course we both know that wasn’t your point, you just want to manipulate people into not challenging you. It’s been an explict strategy of the far-right for around 5 years now, so it’s no surprise to see it used for gun laws that inordinately benefit them.
Cool fantasy, but the rest of the world solved their civil rights problems sooner and didn’t need to routinely arm criminals, idiots and domestic terrorists to accomplish it.
Damn, you’re really betting a lot on people just not fact checking you.
Here is a list of countries by homicide rate. Have a look at the company the U.S keeps around position 50, or the embarrassing collection of countries with a better homicide rate.
Then for context, compare the countries with the the best homicide rates to this list of countries by GDP.
What a surprise, you’re full of shit. Not only is Americas homicide rate abysmal thanks to people like you arming criminals and turning disagreements into murders, people are much safer in other wealthy countries, all of which have stricter gun laws.
This is especially true for minorities, who don’t have people like yourself selling them out to extremists.
Who did you shoot to make it happen? Looks to me like you just voted, then tried to claim other people’s work as the work of guns.
Why are your reproductive rights even under attack if all those cool guns prevent your rights being taken away? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the party that takes $16 million in legal bribes from the gun lobby each year would it?
It used to only be $8 million a year, but for some mysterious reason it doubled in 2012.
“Hopefully rejecting men’s advances doesn’t caused you to get raped”
My claim was that the US homicide rates are a fraction of global rates. Any US rate less than the global rate proves that claim. Your links support my claim. US rates have consistently been ~2/3 global rates for decades.
The rest of your arguments on that point are non-sequitur.
You are upset that our rates are not as low as the nations you have cherry picked for low rates. You have focused on one relatively minor factor in which we differ from those other nations (gun rights) and completely ignore the major factors (welfare state, strong poverty controls, strong worker protections, universal healthcare, etc.) that are actually responsible for those lower rates.
The lack of correlation between GDP per Capita and US homicide rates just tells us the human cost of not implementing those social programs that Europe enjoys.
Ohio was once a key swing state. That started to change about 20 years ago. We swung red, and didn’t go back. Our votes on reproductive rights and marijuana should tell you that we aren’t actually as red as we look in national elections. Either the GOP is right on something (that isn’t abortion or drugs, because they are consistently losing on both) or the Democrats have been very wrong on something in Ohio.
That something is “guns”. We adopted concealed carry in 2004, and support for guns has only increased since then. For 19 years, Democrats have been alienating the majority position on guns in Ohio, and wondering why the state went red.
Florida went the same way, same time frame, same reason.
You’re comparing to the global average because you’re a clown. You need countries with extreme poverty and factional violence dragging up the average because without them, the homicide rate is the U.S is clearly far higher than it should be.
Even then, it’s still higher then the global average of 6.1, despite all your promises that selling guns to dumbfucks lowers the crime rate. If that were even a little bit true, America would be the safest country in the world, not “struggling to hit average”.
Uh huh. Let us know when you’ve finished fixing all that and you can have your guns back.
Until then, all you’re doing is admitting that yet another one of your pro-gun promises is bullshit – the guns do absolutely nothing to keep the government in line and you’re unable to get even the basic health, welfare and worker systems that other countries have.
It’s okay, you can just admit that it was a vote and you didn’t shoot anybody to make it happen. You don’t have to pretend that secretly it’s guns to thank, rather than all the people who actually worked to get those votes heard.
Of course, progressives pushing for things like bodily autonomy do get plenty of death threats from gun owners, but you probably don’t want to take credit for those.
Best of luck on your relationship with your children. I’m sure they don’t mind coming second to your gun collection, even as a record number of teenagers blow their brains out with the gun their father bought to “keep his family safe”.
I already have my guns.
Since you’re just going to “give them back” anyway, how about we go ahead and shift our focus over to the important issues? Issues affecting hundreds of times as many people, and thus hundreds of times more important.
I think we need to take another crack at universal healthcare. I think we should put up a fight to lower the age of medicare from 65 to 60. Insurers aren’t going to fight so hard against it, because 60-65 is the most expensive cohort for them to insure. They stand to greatly improve their short-term profitability. And if it eventually kills the health insurance industry when we repeat it down to 55, 50, 45, so what? All the major players will have cashed out and moved on to the next big thing.
Got it. We need to sweep domestic terrorism under the rug as “not important” and focus on “lets spend a decade giving healthcare to boomers”
Basically correct, except you’re off by one on the generations. Most boomers are already on medicare now; all of them will be in 10 years whether we lower the age or not.
If we lower the age over that 10-year period, all millennials and most of Gen Z will be eligible for Medicare by the end, and the Alphas will be the last generation that didn’t have access to universal coverage by the time they reached adulthood. Better access to healthcare and lower poverty rates will have saved far more lives than any gun ban could have hoped for. Win/win/win for everyone except hoplophobes, Republicans, and medical insurance executives. But all three can go fuck themselves with rusty bayonets.
Only of course its not win/win/win because even if that was the solution to gun violence, thousands of people will die before you accomplish it and thousands more will die as you say “damn that didn’t work after all, better move on to some other plan while staunchly opposing gun control”.
It doesn’t matter what gun violence is a symptom of, we always control symptoms as we look for a cure.
This is the country you have now and the problem you have now. I don’t give a fuck if it wasn’t a problem 50 years ago and you don’t think it will be a problem 50 years from now.