Preemption, in the world of firearm law, is a rational necessity. State preemption laws reserve the full scope of gun regulation for state legislatures. No city or county within a state may regulate firearms.
This keeps Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) cities from making illegal what is perfectly legal elsewhere in the state. It makes the law knowable and uniform. It prevents D/s/c jurisdictions from preying on innocent citizens who stray across their borders.
So of course, just as they ignore the Heller, McDonald and Bruen decisions of the Supreme Court in general, counties like Arizona’s Pima County, which encompasses Tucson, ignore state preemption laws:
Graphic: Glock 43, Author
In a victory for Arizona firearm owners, a state court judge today struck down an illegal law in Pima County that required residents to report lost and stolen firearms to the government within two days…or face $1,000 fines.
Goldwater had sued the county to stop the mandate on behalf of Air Force veteran Chris King and the Pima County-based Arizona Citizens Defense League. As Goldwater attorneys argued before the Pima County Superior Court today, state law prohibits local governments from regulating firearms or firearm-related conduct unless specifically authorized by the state legislature, and the county Board of Supervisors appeared to know as much when it brazenly passed the ordinance.
Judge Greg Sakall agreed that the county’s actions violated multiple provisions of state law. The court’s decision is based in part on the premise that the county cannot enact any firearm-related regulations unless expressly authorized by state law.
Pima County’s Board of Supervisors knew their ordinance was illegal. They also knew they’d have to spend taxpayer dollars to defend it. They knew they’d lose, though they surely hoped it would have to go to the state supreme court, and perhaps all the way to the US Supreme Court wasting untold millions in legal fees and costs.
The costlier the virtue signaling, the more virtuous.
They also had to know their ordinance was fundamentally unreasonable and punitive. It was not designed to deter or punish felonies like burglary. It was designed to punish the law abiding victims of crime, people possessing legal products stolen from them. The two-day reporting requirement is more than sufficient evidence of their malice, their hatred of guns and their owners.
As I’m sure police officers told them, as any rational person could know, it’s common for victims of burglaries not to immediately know everything that was stolen. It might take them weeks to identify everything missing. And where is the societal good in punishing the victims of theft?
I’m sure the Board of Supervisors would argue it’s essential to know about stolen guns, so if they’re used in crimes they can be identified.
Nonsense.
Even if a gun owner can recall the serial number of a stolen gun, unless a criminal leaves it at the scene of a crime, all that might eventually tell the police is who the owner—the victim of burglary—was. It does nothing to solve the eventual crime. Even if a criminal leaves a fingerprint or other DNA evidence on the gun, punishing the burglary victim does nothing to solve the eventual crime, particularly if there are no prints or DNA on file for that criminal. Finding that kind of evidence on guns, unlike what TV crime dramas would have us believe, is exceedingly rare. In all my years of law enforcement, including the years I specialized in vehicle burglaries from which many guns were stolen, I never solved a crime that way, nor was I ever aware of such a solution.
Laws of this sort are the products of unreasoning hatred. Hatred not only of guns, but of gun owners and of liberties of which D/s/cs disapprove, liberties that restrain government’s totalitarian tendencies, that limit their power over every facet of American’s lives. The Supreme Court has ruled Americans have an unalienable, individual right to keep and bear arms? The Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says? The hell with that! We’re Pima County and we can do what we damned well please!
Until and unless voters ensure people like that are never elected to any position of power, the battle for individual liberty will never end. Perhaps, to remind us of what we can lose, it shouldn’t.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.