Opinion: Old laws will doom Michigan's new gun reform measures

OP's Note: This is a paywalled article. I plucked out some of the important graphs


(Detroit Free Press) ......snip)......

Even more astonishing: That was the easy part. All the arguments, the struggle, the anguished testimony from parents and victims, the campaigns and political fights across decades — that was easy, compared to what comes next.

What comes next? Lawsuits filed in federal courts, which will rule all those arguments and testimony and struggle were in vain, because given court decisions across the country, the new laws are going to be declared unconstitutional.

......(snip)......

With Michigan voters placing Democrats in control of the Legislature, and with the horror of the Feb. 13 Michigan State University mass shooting still fresh — and just 15 months after the murders of four students at Oxford High School — the Legislature passed bills requiring greater background checks of gun purchasers and stricter controls on gun storage. Those bills are en route to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's desk. Other bills allowing court orders to seize weapons from individuals considered dangerous are still pending.

Candidly, it won’t matter. Unless the Supreme Court justices slap themselves awake to the mess they created, whatever new controls Michigan enacts will be declared — not possibly declared, will be declared — unconstitutional.

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Already the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision is creating chaos. In February, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court in Texas declared unconstitutional the longstanding federal law barring people under domestic violence personal protection orders from having guns.

In U.S. v. Rahimi, the 5th Circuit specifically said it didn’t matter if the law itself banning those individuals from having guns was good, or had a good purpose. It was simply unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court said in Bruen that a similar type of restriction must have existed when weapons of mass destruction were muzzle-loading flintlocks — and by the way, when domestic violence wasn't usually considered a crime. Absent that, the 5th Circuit ruled, the federal law designed to protect people threatened by abusive spouses or partners doesn't pass the test. .................(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2023/03/27/us-supreme-court-michigan-gun-control-reform-msu-oxford/70022537007/