BELLEVUE, WA – Thursday’s landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming the Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home bolsters gun rights cases filed by the Second Amendment Foundation against Washington statutes that discriminate against the rights of young adults and place arbitrary limits on magazine capacity.
“The high court ruling gives further direction to lower federal courts on how they must interpret the Second Amendment,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “This is the third consecutive Supreme Court victory for the right to keep and bear arms since the 2008 Heller ruling, followed by SAF’s win in the 2010 McDonald case, which incorporated the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment. That decision paved the way for legal challenges to state laws including New York’s egregious and arbitrary carry permit requirement that was firmly crushed.
“Our legal experts are currently reviewing our other past lawsuits to determine whether Thursday’s ruling will provide grounds to refile those cases,” he added. “But for our immediate cases challenging the ban on modern semi-auto firearms purchases for 18-20-year-olds, and the recently-adopted ban on standard capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, the ruling sends a strong signal to politicians and lower court judges that the day of trampling on the Second Amendment has come to an end.
“It should be noted for the record,” Gottlieb observed, “that Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson joined an amicus brief opposing the New York lawsuit while SAF filed a brief supporting the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association’s case. Not only was Ferguson on the losing side, we were on the winning side.
“It’s a dark day,” he added, “for anti-gun-rights Democrats like Ferguson, who don’t believe people should have a right to own a firearm to defend themselves against violent criminals. But as Justice Thomas wrote in his majority opinion, ‘The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’ I think that’s something far too many people like Ferguson don’t care to admit. Now they will have to.”