Schumer Proposes Unconstitutional Infringements on Body Armor Sales

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Senator Chuck Schumer (D) New York, has proposed radical new infringements on the Second Amendment.   Schumer proposed that body armor be prohibited to citizens, and that body armor sales be metered out by the FBI.

None of his proposals were in the form of a bill or written proposals. The proposal is blatantly unconstitutional on its face. Body armor is legal to purchase in all 50 states and is in common use. It is clearly a portable arm, even though its use is primarily defensive in nature. From the nypost.com:

Sen. Chuck Schumer on Sunday proposed new legislation to require the FBI to sign off on body armor sales to civilians.

The announcement comes one week after mass killer Connor Betts — clad in body armor — opened fire in a trendy Dayton, Ohio, neighborhood and killed nine people before he was gunned down by police.

The standard is clear from the Heller decision, clarified in a unanimous decision in Caetano.

Bearable arms are protected by the Second Amendment. They are not unusual if they are in common use. Arms may be regulated to keep them from being used to terrify the population if they are both dangerous and unusual.  Arms that are in common use are not unusual, as per the Supreme Court.  From Caetano:

The Court has held that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570, 582 (2008), and that this “Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States,” McDonald v.Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 750 (2010). In this case, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld a Massachusetts law prohibiting the possession of stun guns after examining “whether a stun gun is the type of weapon contemplated by Congress in 1789 as being protected by the Second Amendment.” 470 Mass. 774, 777, 26 N. E. 3d 688, 691 (2015).

The Left in the United States has not respected the Constitution in a hundred and ten years, since Progressivism became a serious force in American politics. It would be folly to expect them to respect the Constitution and the principle of limited government it is designed to implement. They claim to respect the Constitution by claiming it is infinitely malleable, that words can be twisted to mean their precise opposite, thus allowing Leftist to rule the country without limit.  Their deception, promoted by an ideologically Progressive media, is now widely understood.

Armor has been considered a part of bearable arms since before the historical record, as long as man has existed.

The idea of restricting body armor from the population is so obviously forbidden by the Second Amendment so as to wonder at the purpose of Senator Schumer’s proposal.

I suspect it is a “bargaining chip” to be used as leverage to obtain a ban on the private sale of firearms, also known as “universal background checks”. A gun sale is not private if it is required to be approved by a public entity.

Body armor is used by criminals occasionally. It has been used in two instances of mass murder that I know of, at the Aurora theater mass murder and at the Dayton, Ohio mass murder.

It is more commonly used by police and others for legal defensive purposes. No arms commonly carried by police should be denied to the citizenry.

If an arm is useful to the police, it is useful to citizens.

Use of a single event that arouses public passion, to pass legislation that would never pass otherwise, has been well understood for centuries. The founders understood it and guarded against it.  In the modern parlance, it has been called the “Overton Window”, or as Rahm Emanuel was quoted:

You never let a serious crises go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

The concept is a direct attack on good and prudent government. It presupposes the people in power know best, and thus harness the emotion of a moment to pass legislation that could never pass if considered rationally and judiciously.

It is exactly what the limits on government power were designed to prevent.

One of those limits is the Second Amendment of the Constitution. If Senator Schumer succeeds in his unconstitutional desire to deprive American citizens of body armor, the Courts should quickly and clearly rule it as an unconstitutional infringement.

About Dean Weingarten:

Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.

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