Judicial Fiat
In upholding Maryland's 'assault weapons' ban, the court employed dubious legal reasoning to trample on American constitutional rights. Freed up by the Supreme Court's ongoing reluctance to engage in depth with the Second Amendment, the Fourth Circuit has taken it upon itself to rewrite Heller en banc. In a 10–4 decision, issued yesterday afternoon, the court upheld Maryland's ban on both "assault weapons" and "high capacity magazines." By so doing, it deprived the people of Maryland, the Carolinas, and the Virginias of the core protections to which the Constitution entitles them.
Read more, and watch video here.
All of this judicial activism is supposed to be about promoting "safety" at the expense of liberty. Yet in Maryland in 2015 only 3 people were killed by rifle. Five times that many were beaten to death. Read some context about what was being "controlled" in this case.
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The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just suffered from an outbreak of bad judging. In an en banc opinion, the court ruled that after a lawful traffic stop, the police may frisk any person who they believe may possess a firearm, regardless of whether that person possesses a concealed-carry permit. The court actually typed this sentence: “The danger justifying a protective frisk arises from the combination of a forced police encounter and the presence of a weapon, not from any illegality of the weapon’s possession.” The implications were clear: Even lawful gun owners are by definition “dangerous” and can be broadly treated as such by the state. The court is relegating lawful gun owners to second-class-citizen status.
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Three University of Texas professors asked a U.S. judge to give them the option of barring students from bringing guns into their classroom although it is permitted under state law.
Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, filed papers to halt the injunction, calling the professors' case a "frivolous lawsuit." "There is no legal justification to deny licensed, law-abiding citizens on campus the same measure of personal protection they are entitled to elsewhere in Texas," Paxton said in a statement.
Should the court decide to grant the professors' an injunction simply because they don't like the classroom atmosphere - one that they simply suppose and have not even experienced - it would be an usurpation of the power of the legislature by judicial fiat.
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