“Federal Judge Sides With AG Healey, Rules Second Amendment Does Not Cover AR-15s & High-Capacity Mags”
BOSTON — Attorney General Maura Healey is hailing a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit challenging Massachusetts’s 1998 assault weapons ban, a ruling she said “vindicates the right of the people of Massachusetts to protect themselves from these weapons of war and our efforts to enforce the law.”
The order was handed down by Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge William Young, who concluded firearms such as “AR-15s and its analogs, along with large-capacity magazines, are simply not weapons within the original meaning of the individual constitutional right to bear arms.”
Young later summarized his decision by hinting that if residents living in Democrat-dominated states like Massachusetts are fed up with strict gun laws, they should move elsewhere.
“Both their general acceptance and their regulation, if any, are policy matters not for courts, but left to the people directly through their elected representatives,” he wrote. “In the absence of federal legislation, Massachusetts is free to ban these weapons and large-capacity magazines.
“Other states are equally free to leave them unregulated and available to their law-abiding citizens.”
Young added the following, and included a nod to the deceased conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
“These policy matters are simply not of constitutional moment. Americans are not afraid of bumptious, raucous, and robust debate about these matters. We call it democracy. Justice Scalia would be proud.”
Healey, meanwhile, called it a “victory.”
“Strong gun laws save lives,” she wrote in a Twitter post Friday morning. “We will not be intimidated by the gun lobby in our efforts to end the sale of assault weapons and protect our communities and schools.
www.scribd.com/document/375713002/Worman-Dismissal-SJ-Ruling-4-6-18#from_embed
“Federal Judge Denies AG Healey’s Attempt To Toss ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Lawsuit”
“WORCESTER — At the same that a push is brewing from Massachusetts gun control advocates to make the Bay State’s strict firearms laws go national, a federal judge has determined that there is enough standing to allow a lawsuit challenging Attorney General Maura Healey’s 2016 so-called “copycat” assault weapons ban to move forward.
Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Hillman on Wednesday squashed Healey’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit, filed by several Massachusetts gun retailers in conjunction with the National Shooting Sports Foundation in September 2016. Healey’s motion to dismiss, filed in November 2016, claimed that her enforcement order did not violate Second Amendment and complied with the original assault weapons ban enacted in 1998.”
h/t Mechatronics