Maryland’s Gun Law Unconstitutional

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Under Maryland law, a resident must show a “good and substantial reason” to obtain a handgun permit.

But the state has it exactly backward. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants a citizen the right to own a gun, and the government shall not infringe on that right. The amendment restricts the government, not the people. And wouldn’t you know it? A court agrees with me.

From the AP (emphasis added):

States can channel the way their residents exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms, but because Maryland’s goal was to minimize the number of firearms carried outside homes by limiting the privilege to those who could demonstrate “good reason,” it had turned into a rationing system, infringing upon residents’ rights, U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg wrote.

“A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” he wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

Plaintiff Raymond Woollard obtained a handgun permit after fighting with an intruder in his Hampstead home in 2002, but was denied a renewal in 2009 because he could not show he had been subject to “threats occurring beyond his residence.” Woollard appealed, but was rejected by the review board, which found he hadn’t demonstrated a “good and substantial reason” to carry a handgun as a reasonable precaution. The suit filed in 2010 claimed that Maryland didn’t have a reason to deny the renewal and wrongly put the burden on Woollard to show why he still needed to carry a gun.

Exercise your rights while you still can, people.

Read more at La Shawn Barber’s Corner