Second Amendment Victory: Court Protects Right to Sell Guns

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that yes, there is a right to sell guns under the Second Amendment.

The case involved the three owners of a proposed gun store in Alameda, CA, who were denied a zoning permit for their establishment.  (The anti-gun fools are trying to use the building permit process in Arlington, VA, as well.)

“If ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms’ is to have any force, the people must have a right to acquire the very firearms they are entitled to keep and to bear,” wrote Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain for the 2-1 majority, quoting the Second Amendment. “One cannot truly enjoy a constitutionally protected right when the state is permitted to snuff out the means by which he exercises it.”

It seems ridiculously obvious that if the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, it would also protect the sale of those firearms. But alas, it is not always obvious.

The ruling rests on similar court decisions like the ruling protecting the right to buy ammunition and the ruling protecting the right to train with your firearm around at a gun range.

The anti-Second Amendment crowd reminds me of my cats (who are smarter than the Moms Demand crew) when they are determined to snatch food off my dinner plate. First they try the full frontal assault by jumping on the dinner table and just swiping what they want. When that doesn’t work, they will jump on a chair and extend their paw toward my food from a lower vantage point, hoping I do not notice. When that doesn’t work, they sit on the chair and move slowly (closer to the location of the food) and gingerly maneuver their paw toward my meal. It never works. And it isn’t working for the gun-control crowd with their tricks to ban ammunition, ban gun ranges, and ban gun stores since they can’t just ban guns entirely.

Judge Barry Silverman was the lone dissenter in the case and wrote: “Conspicuously missing from this lawsuit is any honest-to-God resident of Alameda County complaining that he or she cannot lawfully buy a gun nearby.” That’s the beauty of our rights, Judge Silverman, there is no threshold to be reached before they “kick in.”

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors had rejected the permit for the gun store under a zoning regulation that prohibits gun stores from locating within 500 feet of residential areas. The proposed gun store was determined to be 446 feet away from the nearest residential property.  The county zoning board had initially approved the permit only to have it revoked by the Board of Supervisors when Alameda homeowners challenged the decision to issue a permit.

The three business partners sued the county, claiming the 500-feet regulation violated the Second Amendment. The men went so far as to commission a study to locate a property that conformed to the 500-feet rule. Their study determined there was no  property that met that criterion, ergo no gun store in Alameda County.

The anti-Second Amendment folks in Alameda have not given up. “Our intent is to continue to defend our ordinance,” Donna Ziegler, Alameda County counsel, said.