Gun owners and 2nd Amendment supporters unite. We must keep pressure on our duly elected representatives to prevent a judge like Merrick B. Garland from being appointed to the SCOTUS. Of course, no hearing is constitutionally required for Garland’s appointment.
Garland is an anti-2nd Amendment judge. Therefore, I don’t consider him to be qualified for the Supremes. The Bill of (Individual) Rights is a very important part of the U.S. Constitution and I expect Justices to uphold the U.S. Constitution, not rewrite it in their own image or to support their chosen political party.
*Back in 2007, Judge Garland voted to undo a D.C. Circuit court decision striking down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The liberal District of Columbia government had passed a ban on individual handgun possession, which even prohibited guns kept in one’s own house for self-defense. A three-judge panel struck down the ban, but Judge Garland wanted to reconsider that ruling. He voted with Judge David Tatel, one of the most liberal judges on that court. As Dave Kopel observed at the time, the “[t]he Tatel and Garland votes were no surprise, since they had earlier signaled their strong hostility to gun owner rights” in a previous case. Had Garland and Tatel won that vote, there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had a chance to protect the individual right to bear arms for several more years.
Moreover, in the case mentioned earlier, Garland voted with Tatel to uphold an illegal Clinton-era regulation that created an improvised gun registration requirement. Congress prohibited federal gun registration mandates back in 1968, but as Kopel explained, the Clinton Administration had been “retaining for six months the records of lawful gun buyers from the National Instant Check System.” By storing these records, the federal government was creating an informal gun registry that violated the 1968 law. Worse still, the Clinton program even violated the 1994 law that had created the NICS system in the first place. Congress directly forbade the government from retaining background check records for law abiding citizens.
Garland thought all of these regulations were legal, which tells us two things. First, it tells us that he has a very liberal view of gun rights, since he apparently wanted to undo a key court victory protecting them. Second, it tells us that he’s willing to uphold executive actions that violate the rights of gun owners.*
The 'Moderates' Are Not So Moderate: Merrick Garland | National Review
Garland choses to ignore the will of Congress, and the people, when he judged that Congress didn’t know what it was talking about when Congress made it clear that firearm owner registrations would not be kept by the FBI.
*In 1993, Congress enacted the “Brady Bill,” while providing that the Brady waiting period would sunset in five years, to be replaced with the National Instant Check System (NICS) for all retail gun purchases. Although prior law and the 1993 law both forbade the federal government from using the NICS to register gun owners, Janet Reno and the FBI immediately began using the NICS for gun registration.
The National Rifle Association sued, and eventually lost a 2-1 decision before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. This loss should be a caution to everyone who believes that moderate gun controls can still protect Second Amendment rights.
Under the NICS, when a firearm purchase is made through a licensed dealer, that dealer must submit detailed information about the prospective purchaser to the FBI before the firearm is transferred.
The NRA lawsuit argued that the law requires Instant Check records to be destroyed immediately upon “proceed” or “denial” of firearm purchase. But the FBI wants to keep that information for six months. And thanks to the use of computer backup tapes, information that is erases from a particular computer after six months may exist on backup tapes forever.
When the NICS law was enacted in November 1993, Section 103(i)(2) made it clear that the names of firearm purchasers were not to be retained in the system: “No department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States may…use the system established under this section to establish any system for the registration of firearms (or) firearm owners…” The same prohibition against federal gun registration also appears in the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act.
Nevertheless, Judges David S. Tatel and Merrick B. Garland, both Clinton appointees, maintained that Federal law “does not prohibit all forms of registration.” Actually, the federal statute explicitly bans any registration.
In arguing that FBI retention of information does not constitute registration, the two Clinton-appointed judges noted that the FBI list does not contain the names of every U.S. gun-owner, and that the retention of names was not intended to be permanent. These arguments ignore the obvious fact that partial or temporary registration is still a “system of registration.”
Dissenting Judge David B. Sentelle, a Reagan appointee, opined that Congress was perfectly clear when stating it wanted the NICS records destroyed – and destroyed immediately, not six months later. “The Attorney General [Janet Reno]'s position,” Sentelle wrote, “strikes me as reminiscent of a petulant child pulling her sister’s hair. Her mother tells her, ‘Don’t pull the baby’s hair.’ The child says, ‘All right, Mama,’ but again pulls the infant’s hair. Her defense is, ‘Mama, you didn’t say I had to stop right now.’”*
http://www.davekopel.com/NRO/2000/Instant-Check-Permanent-Record.htm