A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down Maryland’s handgun licensing law, finding that its requirements, which include submitting fingerprints for a background check and taking a four-hour firearms safety course, are unconstitutionally restrictive.
In a 2-1 ruling, judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said they considered the case in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that “effected a sea change in Second Amendment law.”
The underlying lawsuit was filed in 2016 as a challenge to a Maryland law requiring people to obtain a special license before purchasing a handgun. The law, which was passed in 2013 in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, laid out a series of necessary steps for would-be gun purchasers: completing four hours of safety training that includes firing one live round, submitting fingerprints and passing a background check, being 21 and residing in Maryland.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said he was disappointed in the circuit court’s ruling and will “continue to fight for this law.” He said his administration is reviewing the ruling and considering its options.
The problem is that US law is ridiculously and unnecessarily convoluted. There’s Federal law, which is supposed to be comprehensive but intentionally has holes in it that State law is supposed to flesh out for themselves. However Federal law overrules state law, meaning that State law can only ever fit inside Federal law.
This leads to Federal law being lazily written, such that it covers a far wider breadth than it was ever intended. Meanwhile, when States try to write their own laws to fill in the gap, they get overruled by Federal law.
If you have a Federal legislative body - Congress, the people who are supposed to write laws - in perpetual turmoil, and a Supreme Court that is politically stacked, then you can easily invent case law to twist whatever legislation was written decades or centuries ago into whatever you desire.
And all of this glosses over the fact that US law is written in horrible language. I dread to think the fit that a modern grammatical spell checker would go through if you copy/pasted the law into it, with how the sentence structure is drawn on with commas and bullshit. If Clippy were still around, he would’ve been bent so far out of shape he could hack a Nintendo Switch. Yet, because it’s at the Federal level, which is detracted further from the people, there isn’t enough of a public incentive to have it written plainly so that everyone could understand it.
You don’t get a vote on laws, you get a vote on “representatives” who vote on laws
on your behalfbased on their financial backers.