Federal Court Finds AR-15s Are Not Protected Under 2nd Amendment

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Federal Court Finds AR-15s Are Not Protected Under 2nd Amendment

February 22nd, 2017

Awake Goy

Federal Court Finds AR-15s Are Not Protected Under 2nd Amendment

Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Host of Hardline Radio Show

The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia upheld Maryland’s ban on assault weapons and 10 round limitations on magazines. In the 10-4 ruling, 45 different kinds of military-style guns were deemed not protected by the 2nd Amendment.

Four years ago, Maryland barred the sale, possession, transfer, and purchase of “assault weapons” which included AR-15s, AK-47s and semi-automatic rifles; as well as large capacity magazines.

Judge Robert King stated that the 2nd Amendment does not “extend… protection to weapons of war” and citied the infamous District of Columbia v. Heller case that explicitly excluded military-style weapons.

According to the US Supreme Court case, “dangerous and unusual weapons” can be outlawed, and guns that “are most useful in military service… may be banned.”

The 4th Circuit agreed with the Supreme Court and ruled that military-style firearms “are unquestionably most useful in military service. That is, the banned assault weapons are designed to kill or disable the enemy on the battlefield.”

The judges continued: “The next effect of these military combat features, is a capability for lethality—more wounds, more serious, in more victims—far beyond that of other firearms in general, including other semiautomatic guns.”

Large-capacity magazines “are particularly designed and most suitable for military and law enforcement applications… [to] enable a shooter to hit multiple human targets very rapidly.”

Judge J.Harvie Wilkinson wrote about the gun lobby’s habit of using the court system as a way to increase access to military-style weapons in a separate opinion: “As Heller recognized, there is a balance to be struck here. While courts exist to protect individual rights, we are not the instruments of anyone’s political agenda, we are not empowered to court mass consequences we cannot predict, and we are not impaneled to add indefinitely to the growing list of subjects on which the states of our Union and the citizens of our country no longer have any meaningful say.”

In response to the tactic of using the 2nd Amendment to justify the sale of dangerous firearms, Wilkinson wrote: “Disenfranchising the American people on this life and death subject would be the gravest and most serious of steps. To say in the wake of so many mass shootings in so many localities across this country that the people themselves are now to be rendered newly powerless, that all they can do is stand by and watch as federal courts design their destiny—this would deliver a body blow to democracy as we have known it since the very founding of this nation.”

Brian Frosh, attorney general for the state of Maryland argued that semi-automatic machine guns are not the same as the “weapons that caused the carnage in Newtown and in other communities across the country, [and] would be protected by the Second Amendment.”