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View Full Version : Supreme Court Second Amendment Case Could Overrule Heller Decision in 2017



jimnyc
09-20-2016, 05:32 PM
WASHINGTON—For the first time in U.S. history, a federal appeals court on Friday struck down a federal gun-control law for violating the Second Amendment, meaning that next year the Supreme Court will hear a case that includes the opportunity to abolish citizens’ right to bear arms by overruling the Court’s famous Heller precedent.

Clifford Tyler is a law-abiding and peaceful citizen living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1985, his wife of 23 years was having an adulterous affair. She ran off with the other man and took all of Clifford’s money with her. His daughters found him so upset and depressed, banging his head on the floor, that they called the authorities, fearing he might harm himself.

Tyler was taken before a Michigan judge, who ruled there was sufficient reason to be concerned about the distraught man to commit him to a facility for psychiatric evaluation. A couple weeks later the doctors released him with a clean bill of health, saying that he was a perfectly normal person who had a really horrible day. Tyler continued to be a good citizen, a good employee, got remarried, has been a good father, and eventually even repaired his relationship with his unfaithful ex-wife.

He’s now age 74, and wanted to buy a handgun to keep at home for self-defense. But the government told him that federal law bars him from ever owning a gun, so he went to court to assert his Second Amendment rights.

In 2008, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller—one of the most famous decisions ever written by Justice Antonin Scalia—held that the Second Amendment is an individual right, and as such does not allow the federal government to bar law-abiding and peaceable American citizens from keeping a handgun in their home. Heller was a 5-4 decision, and left other gun-rights questions for future cases.

Heller specified that it was not weighing in on certain issues, including laws that prohibit certain people from owning guns. Federal law in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) is one of these gun-control laws, providing that no one “who has been committed to a mental institution” can own firearms.

In 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed an NRA-supported law advancing Second Amendment rights, including 18 U.S.C. § 925(c), which empowers the Justice Department to restore gun rights if the attorney general finds a particular person to be safe and sane. But Congress stopped funding that program in 1992, canceling out that Reagan-era protection for America’s 90 million gun owners.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/20/supreme-court-second-amendment-case-overrule-heller-2017/

Elessar
09-20-2016, 05:37 PM
He was exonerated; Federal law in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) was applied improperly. He has
a legitimate appeal.