The Federal District Court in Connecticut ruled against the Second Amendment in our case against the state’s semi-auto and standard capacity magazine bans. You can read the ruling here.
In her ruling, Judge Janet Bond Arterton, a Clinton appointee, twisted the Supreme Court’s Heller and Bruen decisions in order to uphold gun control in a very long and convoluted ruling.
Bruen clearly states that “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct…”, meaning that the burden falls on the government to prove that the legislation falls within the text, history, and tradition of firearm regulation in the US.
Judge Arterton ignored this and said:
“Nothing in Bruen or any other cases that the plaintiffs cite grants them an automatic presumption that their conduct is constitutionally protected which defendants are the required to affirmatively rebut.”
This impermissibly puts the burden of proof on us.
She went on to make two particular outrageous assertions in her ruling:
- She calls gun owners liars, implying that just because an individual claims he owns a firearm strictly for the purposes of self-defense, that doesn’t actually mean that that’s what it will be used for.
- She said that gun owners have to actually USE their weapons for self-defense in order to fall under the protection of the Second Amendment.
In other words, if an individual owns a firearm strictly for the purposes of self-defense, but is lucky enough to never actually be attacked, too bad. The Second Amendment doesn’t protect you.
If you want to read more of Judge Arterton’s judicial gymnastics, you can do so here.
We will be appealing to the Second Circuit, which also covers New York and Vermont. Our strategy is to get a semi-auto ban and magazine ban lawsuit to the Supreme Court and end these unconstitutional bans nationwide, so with our appeal to the 2nd Circuit, we are one step closer to that goal.
