Second Amendment Commons^™

Reciprocal Concealed Carry: The Constitutional Issues, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Depriving Our Veterans Of Their Constitutional Rights: An Analysis Of The Department Of Veterans Affairs’ Practice Of Stripping Veterans Of Their Second Amendment Rights And Our Nation’S Response, Stacey-Rae Simcox

Utah Law Review

This Article does not argue that veterans who have been adjudicated mentally incompetent by a court after a hearing or have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility should be permitted to purchase or possess firearms. However, this Article does compare the VA’s determination of “financial incompetency” to other determinations of “mental defectiveness,” demonstrating that the VA’s standards do not rise to the level of “adjudicat[ing] [the veteran] a mental defective” in a manner sufficient for him to be stripped of his constitutional rights. This Article also argues that including veterans determined financially incompetent for VA purposes on a …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Good Reason" Laws Under The Gun: May-Issue States And The Right To Bear Arms, Jack M. Amaro

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This note proposes a framework for analyzing the point at which discretionary restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms are unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, which, at its core, guarantees the responsible, law-abiding citizen at least the right to use a firearm for self-defense. Although the Supreme Court has yet to affirmatively answer whether and to what extent this right extends beyond the home, every state allows its residents to publicly carry a firearm in some form—be it open or concealed. But states have the power to limit who may exercise this right; and some states curtail it to the …

The Business Of Guns: The Second Amendment & Firearms Commerce, Corey A. Ciocchetti

Pepperdine Law Review

Does the Second Amendment protect commerce in firearms? The simple answer is: yes, to an extent. An individual’s right to possess and use a gun for self-defense in the home is black-letter law after District of Columbia v. Heller. The right to possess and use a gun requires the ability to obtain a gun, ammunition, and firearms training. Therefore, gun dealers, servicers, and training providers receive some constitutional protection as facilitators of their customers’ Second Amendment rights. Whether these constitutional rights belong to firearms-related businesses independently of their customers is unclear. The scope of the Second Amendment matters as recent, …

On Mootness: The New York State Rifle Pistol Association V. The City Of New York, New York, Thomas Reuter

Fordham Undergraduate Law Review

The principles of limited government, separation of powers, and federalism have become ubiquitous colloquialisms echoed in the halls of legislatures, courts, and research institutions. Despite preconceived notions, these principles are not partisan. Their application may be debated, but their importance is not denied. This Note examines the limits of the Supreme Court of the United States as established in Article III of the United States Constitution. Specifically, it defines the standards of justiciability and examines one element: mootness. The Note looks at a 2013 New York City case regarding Second Amendment rights: The New York State Rifle Pistol Association v. …

The Itunes Of Downloadable Guns: Firearms As A First Amendment Right, Sandra Sawan Lara

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

As society becomes more technology driven, legal issues continue to arise around the world. From privacy to national security, technology develops at a rate the law simply cannot keep up with. In the United States, one of the biggest legal issues is how the new risks technology brings will interfere with our individual liberties.

Technologies like three-dimensional (“3D”) printing have transformed everything from lifesaving surgeries to gun manufacturing. This technology has led to a whole new way of communicating via computer coding, with the online open source movement leading innovation by allowing for the sharing and editing of files freely. …

The Bb Gun: A Harmless Toy Or Deadly Weapon? Practical Guidance For Objective Fact Finding In A Criminal Case, Steven N. Gosney, John Zak

Criminal Law Practitioner

No abstract provided.

The Diverging Right(S) To Bear Arms: Private Armament And The Second And Fourteenth Amendments In Historical Context, Alexander Gouzoules

Faculty Publications

This article compares the historical evolution of the social understanding of private armament with contemporary legal doctrine on the right to bear arms. The District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which held that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to self-defense, and the McDonald v. City of Chicago decision, which held the Second Amendment to be incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, both turned on extensive historical analysis. But by reading a broad “individual right to self-defense” into both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, the Court assumed continuity between the social understandings at the time of these amendments’ respective ratifications. …

A Secret Weapon?: Applying Privacy Doctrine To The Second Amendment, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Paying For Gun Violence, Samuel D. Brunson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Gun violence is an outsized problem in the United States. Between a culture that allows for relatively unconstrained firearm ownership and a constitutional provision that ensures that ownership will continue to be relatively unchecked, it has proven virtually impossible for politicians to address the problem of gun violence. And yet, gun violence costs the United States tens of billions of dollars or more annually. These tens of billions of dollars are negative externalities — costs that gun owners do not bear themselves, and thus that are imposed on the victims of violence and on taxpayers generally.

What can we do …

The Hard, Simple Truth About Gun Control, Carl Bogus

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What's Going Wrong In Nevada? A Comparative Analysis Of California And Nevada Gun Control Laws As They Relate To Gun Violence, Danielle Chami

CMC Senior Theses

The recent mass shooting on October 1, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada has been marked in history as the worst mass shooting in the United States to this point. The details of the shooting beg the question, is it coincidence that it happened in Nevada, a state with some of the least restrictive gun control laws? Mass shootings have become an unfortunate part of reality in the United States, but these are fairly uncommon occurrences. While they are horrific and deserve attention, daily gun violence cannot be forgotten. In the face of such a multitude of gun violence, what can …

Out Of The Home And In Plain Sight: Our Evolving Second Amendment And Open Carry In Wisconsin, Lance Duroni

Marquette Law Review

none

Gun Control: The Gun Violence Epidemic In The U.S., Anna Koduru

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

While holding almost half of all civilian-owned guns around the globe and yet only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, the United States of America is heavily centered around gun rights due to the 2nd amendment in the U.S. Constitution. But gun violence is on the rise as deaths due to gun violence are at its highest rate in nearly 40 years. Americans are divided amongst themselves when it comes to how we must approach this issue. In order to reduce gun violence in the U.S., both Republican and Democrat leaders must come together and make bipartisan moves to implement …

Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …

Political And Non-Political Speech And Guns, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

Constitutional rights depend on justifications. Some combination of theory, his- tory, and practical reasoning needs to establish why and to what extent a given right warrants legal protection. The justifications that courts and theorists articulate for a given right determine the right’s breadth and the specific contours of its protection. Justification has particular importance at the formative stage of a newly recognized constitutional right. At present, courts are building doctrine around the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,”1 recognized as an individ- ual right just over a decade ago in District of Columbia v. Heller.2 …

Response: Rights As Trumps Of What?, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bans, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

In the universe of legal restrictions subject to judicial review, those characterized as fully denying some aspect of a constitutional right—bans—are often subject to per se rules of invalidity. Whether the subject of the restriction is a medium of expression, the valuable use of property, or a class of weapons, courts in such cases will often short-circuit the standard doctrinal machinery and strike down the law, even if it might have survived heightened scrutiny. Identifying laws as bans can thus provide an end run around the tiers of scrutiny and other familiar forms of means-ends analysis.

And yet it is …

Owning Heller, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Recent historical research using big-data techniques casts doubt on whether District of Columbia v. Heller was rightly decided according to originalist methods. These new discoveries put originalists in a bind. Do they embrace “faint hearted” originalism: the idea that as between the need for stability in prior decision making, settled expectations, and the coherence of the law, some adulterated decisions must remain enforced for the greater good? Or do they follow Justice Thomas’s reasoning in Gamble v. United States, remain stout-hearted, and reject any prior decision that cannot be supported by the common linguistic usage of the founding era – …