The rulings in Maryland and Oregon come amid a shifting legal landscape in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that has imposed new limits on gun regulation.
In the wake of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that significantly limits what the government can do to restrict guns, states led by Democrats have scrambled to circumvent or test the limits of the ruling. A few have approved new gun restrictions. Oregon even passed a ballot initiative to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines.
But this week, supporters of the new gun measures suffered a pair of setbacks, underscoring the rippling effect of the court’s decision.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., ruled that a 10-year-old Maryland law related to licensing requirements for handguns was unconstitutional.
This is basically how gun laws have worked in Canada for ages. Treating access to guns the same way you do cars just makes sense. Of course the ease of being able to smuggle weapons bought from the unregulated US sources has meant that gun crime here is still a major problem compared to countries who share borders with others with similar gun control laws. The majority of gun crime in Canada happens with illegally sourced weapons 85% of which has been sourced to guns purchased in the US. Mexico experiences a similar issue.
Gun pollution spreads over our borders and the US is simply big enough and self obsessed enough to not care. Every democratic nation has it’s own version of the US Constitution and unlike when the US Constitution was written, democracies now make up the majority of government systems on the world stage. There are now a lot of democratic societies who have been stable and just fine without massive amounts of citizen gun ownership. In a very real way American gun law structured as it is interferes with our country’s ability to address guns on our own democratic and constitutional grounds.
Democracy and freedoms of the kind the US bills itself on is now considered pretty basic worldwide. Anyone operating on an originalist veiw really needs to unbury their head from the sand and realize how much the world has changed since it was written.