A wall of customer stored rifles and handguns at Max Pawn Shop on W. Sahara in Las Vegas. Max Pawn offers free gun safety information and free gun storage for their customers. Thursday, June 16, 2022
Friday, Oct. 7, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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A conservative Las Vegas-based gun-rights organization successfully convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to put guns in the hands of criminals who were previously convicted of gun crimes.
We’ll rephrase that to make sure we’re being clear.
Despite decades of rhetoric about responsible gun ownership, making our streets safe, holding criminals accountable for their individual actions and the need to keep guns out of the hands of convicted criminals, conservative gun rights advocates based right here in Las Vegas successfully vacated a decision by a lower court upholding a Massachusetts law that restricted criminals convicted of a gun-related crime from purchasing a firearm in the future.
The case in question, Morin v. Lyver, involved a gun owner, Alfred Morin, who illegally carried a firearm and ammunition in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. To his credit, Morin’s handgun was licensed and registered in his home state of Massachusetts and he claims he was unaware of Washington’s restrictions on carrying concealed weapons. And to his credit, he was caught and arrested only after revealing the weapon to a guard at the American Museum of Modern History while inquiring about how to check the weapon since the museum was a gun-free zone.
By all accounts, Morin is not a bad guy. But he is an irresponsible adult gun owner who should be responsible for his own choices and actions.
He actively chose to remain ignorant of the law in a place that any rational person would expect to be extra concerned about safety, security and the potential for gun violence.
Gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association have spent decades touting the virtues of responsible gun owners, how seriously they take the responsibility of carrying a deadly weapon and their respect for the law. Yet in this instance, Morin failed to do even the least bit of research about where he could legally carry a firearm in a city that is famous for its firearms restrictions.
As a result of his choice to ignore the law, he is also a criminal, who pleaded guilty to illegally carrying a firearm and ammunition. Because Morin is a criminal convicted of a firearms-related offense, Massachusetts prohibited him from purchasing firearms. And the restriction wasn’t an absolute bar on all gun possession. It left open the opportunity for him to legally inherit or otherwise be gifted a firearm.
He filed suit in 2015 challenging the prohibition.
Enter the Firearms Policy Council and Firearms Policy Action Foundation, a Las Vegas-based nonprofit organization dedicated to creating “a world of maximal human liberty.”
The organization’s stated goals include protecting the rights of citizens to have semiautomatic weapons, high-capacity magazines and unmarked, untraceable “self-manufactured” guns — also known as ghost guns. In other words, it advocates for all of the ideal weapons for carrying out anonymous rapid-fire mass acts of violence like the Oct. 1 massacre or school shootings like Uvalde, Texas.
According to its website, it also believes these materials should be readily available to anyone, including children and criminals by “expand(ing) young people’s understanding and adoption of the philosophy of natural rights” and “establish(ing) clear protections against prohibition and/or seizure of personal property, as well as unjust incarceration ...”
It openly admits its work includes “protect(ing) the resources, markets and conduct essential to … (p)ersonally build (self-manufacture) arms, including by and through the acquisition and possession of the tools, information/files and materials/supplies to do so.”
It’s hard to imagine protecting the “markets and conduct” essential to acquiring, possessing and manufacturing otherwise restricted weapons without also protecting underground black markets that trade in illegal weapons, illegal weapons components, and knowledge about how to illegally manufacture untraceable weapons for nefarious purposes. Plus, this statement appears to be an overt endorsement of unrestrained 3D printing of any type of firearm.
And in its petition to the Supreme Court, the organization actively argues that criminal convictions, including gun-related convictions are insufficient reasons to bar people from purchasing guns moving forward.
We don’t think we’re being unreasonable or even “anti-gun” by saying that such an argument, being made by such an extremist organization, is absurd, and would be almost laughable if there weren’t so many innocent lives on the line.
The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, support universal background checks that prevent convicted criminals from purchasing firearms. The vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, agree that keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill is important to keeping our communities safe.
Yet, the Supreme Court sided with the guy who willfully chose to remain ignorant of the law and his support group of unmarked high-capacity ghost gun-toting extremists, vacating the ruling of a lower court that upheld Massachusetts’ restrictions.
We would ask where the outrage is from self-proclaimed “responsible” gun owners and gun-rights organizations, but we’ve learned that we’ll never see them outraged by decisions like this, because too many of them don’t actually believe in the lies they spew. All they really want is guns flooding our streets.
It’s the same reason self-described “responsible” gun owners aren’t outraged by loopholes in the background check system, like the Nevada gun show loophole that legally allows “private collectors” to “privately” sell a small country’s arsenal worth of firearms to other “private purchasers” without a background check at “private” vendor booths at large gun shows.
So we won’t hold our breath for their outrage or their action decrying this travesty of justice.
Rather, we’re asking you, the people of Nevada and the United States who have to live in a country where gun violence threatens our lives and the lives of our children every day, to be outraged instead.
We’re asking you to demonstrate that outrage by voting against candidates at the ballot box who think that winning the votes of gun rights extremists, ghost gun advocates and criminal cartels is more important than keeping our communities safe.
With time, maybe we can get those same gun-rights extremists out of the Supreme Court and return to a time when keeping guns out of the hands of convicted criminals was something we could all agree on.
