Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in U.S. v. Small. The case involves interpretation of 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1), which prohibits firearms possession by any person “who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” The question for the Court is whether the statute applies to foreign convictions, or only to American convictions.
Before buying a gun in Pennsylvania in 1998, Small had been convicted in a Japanese court of a non-violent firearms offense punishable by more than one year in prison. The procedures of the Japanese trial were grossly divergent from American legal standards of due process.
Small is represented by Paul Boas (who gave the oral argument) and Stephen Halbrook (a firearms law expert with a 3-0 record in Supreme Court cases).
The Halbrook and Boas
opening brief
argues that when Congress said “any court,” Congress meant “any state or federal court.” Halbrook and Boas muster a host of federal statutory and legislative history arguments to support their point.
They also point out that Congress has explicitly found the Second Amendment to be an individual right, and that Congress therefore would not want a person to be deprived of one constitutional right based on a foreign court conviction obtained contrary to other standards in the Bill of Rights.
Another interesting
brief
on Halbrook’s
website
is the Virginia state case of Orion Sporting Group v. Nelson County. The case is currently before the Virginia intermediate court of appeals. Nelson County denied Orion a permit to use land for simulated hunting. Halbrook argues that the denial violates the Virginia Constitution, which guarantees the right to hunt.
Orion wants to operate a sporting clays facility. Sporting clays, which first became popular in the 1980s, involves firing a shotgun at clay disks. Sporting clays is usually considered much more difficult than trap or skeet shooting, because the clays fly in a wide variety of different paths–such as very steep arcs in the air, or gliding a few feet off the ground. Sporting clay fields are natural land, comparable to typical bird hunting terrain.
Bolstering Halbrook’s argument are Virginia state laws which specify how local governments may regulate firearms discharge. The Orion sporting clays field would comply with all such laws.
The Nelson County government argues that since Orion is a corporation, it is not a person, and therefore has no right to hunt. Halbrook answers that “the constitutional right to hunt implies a right to make and provide the goods and services that make hunting possible, just as the right to a free press includes a right of corporations to print newspapers or communicate on signs. Corporations manufacture firearms, ammunition, clay pigeons, blaze orange clothing, and other items necessary for hunting, and corporations sponsor hunting safety classes, opportunities for simulated and actual hunting, and other services. “
These days, even anti-gun groups claim that they support “gun safety.” An isolated 450 acre rural tract is certainly a safe place to shoot sporting clays, and to improve the shooting skills that are important to safe hunting.
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