Gun rights wins in Colorado and Maryland
Posted by Richard on March 5, 2012
The Colorado Supreme Court killed the University of Colorado’s ban on campus concealed carry today. From Rocky Mountain Gun Owners:
This ruling supported the decision of a court of appeals from April 2010, and reversed a position paper by then-Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar (an opinion which the current Attorney General, John Suthers, refused to change).
The crux of today’s ruling states that the Colorado General Assembly did, in fact, intend on concealed carry permit holders to be able to carry on all campuses, statewide.
“First CSU and the Community Colleges, and now all the CU Campuses; finally, the administrators for Colorado’s public colleges have been told they don’t have dictatorial powers,” said Dudley Brown, Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), and a lobbyist for the entire 9-year battle for Colorado’s Concealed Carry Act.
“The creation of this criminal safezone, where only criminals are armed, was ill-advised and dangerous to anyone who finds themselves on a college campus,” Brown said.
“Now, RMGO will move on to force more publicly owned facilities to live by the law.”
Meanwhile in Maryland, a federal court has ruled that the right to bear arms doesn’t end at your front door. The Second Amendment Foundation called it a “huge victory”:
Ruling in the case of Woollard v. Sheridan – a case brought by SAF in July 2010 on behalf of Maryland resident Raymond Woollard, who was denied his carry permit renewal – the U.S. District Court for Maryland ruled that “The Court finds that the right to bear arms is not limited to the home.”
U.S. District Court Judge Benson Everett Legg noted, “In addition to self-defense, the (Second Amendment) right was also understood to allow for militia membership and hunting. To secure these rights, the Second Amendment‘s protections must extend beyond the home: neither hunting nor militia training is a household activity, and ‘self-defense has to take place wherever [a] person happens to be’.”
“This is a monumentally important decision,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “The federal district court has carefully spelled out the obvious, that the Second Amendment does not stop at one’s doorstep, but protects us wherever we have a right to be. Once again, SAF’s attorney in this case, Alan Gura, has won an important legal victory. He was the attorney who argued the landmark Heller case, and he represented SAF in our Supreme Court victory in McDonald v. City of Chicago.
“Equally important in Judge Legg’s ruling,” he added, “is that concealed carry statutes that are so discretionary in nature as to be arbitrary do not pass constitutional muster.”
“A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” Judge Legg wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”
A very good day for self-defense rights.
Leave a Comment