The recent announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that it had filed lawsuits against Denver and the state of Colorado, challenging unconstitutional gun laws, drew praise from many on the gun-rights side of the issue.
On May 5, the DOJ filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado seeking to have the city’s longstanding ban on common semi-automatic rifles ruled unconstitutional and stricken from the books. The next day, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado, challenging its ban on standard-capacity firearm magazines that hold more than 15 rounds of ammunition.
At the time, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) called the Denver lawsuit “long overdue.”
“The time has come for local governments to get a reality check about infringing on the Second Amendment rights of their constituents,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said in a news release. “For too long, state legislatures, county councils and city governments have whittled away at the right of their citizens to keep and bear arms, and they’ve continued doing it because past Justice Departments and administrations never bothered to intervene.”
As you might expect, anti-gunners have taken a far dimmer view of the lawsuits. That included the Denver Post, which ran a scathing May 8 editorial written by the newspaper’s editorial board that showed not only their lack of understanding of the Second Amendment, but also important Supreme Court precedent.
In the editorial titled, “DOJ waits 37 years to challenge Denver’s gun control and still manages to pick one of the worst possible times,” the editorial seems caught up on the fact that both the Denver ban and the Colorado mag ban have been in existence for a few decades.
“The DOJ is now suing Denver over its ban on weapons that can hold more than 15 bullets, and it is suing the state of Colorado over a similar ban on magazines that hold more than 15 bullets,” the editorial stated. “These long-delayed federal challenges against common-sense gun laws are silly, given that both laws have already withstood numerous legal challenges and predate the common circulation in America of weapons intended for war.”
As TTAG readers are aware, just because an unconstitutional law has been on the books for a long time doesn’t make it any less constitutional. We can all be thankful to finally have a DOJ that is now targeting such unjust laws, rather than ignoring them as was the case until now.
The editorial board then went on to explain its perceived effectiveness of such laws, again showing a lack of understanding of the Second Amendment.
“The U.S. Department of Justice wants us to believe that because millions of semi-automatic, high-capacity weapons are in circulation, gun bans like the one in Denver are ineffective and unconstitutional,” the editorial stated. “But we know that the type of gun used makes a drastic difference in the outcome of the mass shooting. Every time laws keep an assault rifle out of the hands of someone intent on killing as many people as possible, lives are saved.”
First, the editorial board doesn’t have any research to back up such a statement. In fact, FBI figures show that rifles of all kinds are used in less than 3% of deaths attributed to firearms, and so-called “assault weapons” are only a subset of that rifle category. If they really wanted to stop so-called “gun violence,” they’d target handguns, but they gave that up years ago when they learned Americans didn’t agree with them on that topic.
Next, even if such laws were effective at “saving lives,” which there is no proof they are, it wouldn’t matter as far as the Constitution is concerned. Under the 2022 Bruen ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court set forth a two-part test to determine if gun laws are constitutional. First, does the law infringe on a person’s ability to keep and bear arms? If so, is there a historical precedent from the founding era for such a law?
Ultimately, both the Denver and Colorado laws yield a “yes” to the first part and a “no” to the second. That makes them unconstitutional and ripe for rejection by the courts, whether the high-and-mighty Denver Post editorial board agrees or not.