"Shotgun" Joe's Home State High Court Understands!
After many years of prohibiting firearms in state parks, citizens may now exercise their civil right to bear arms in those parks due to a recent Delaware Supreme Court ruling. The ban on weapons carried into state parks was rescinded.
The issue here is not whether the government may regulate firearms, but whether DNREC and DOA (the “Agencies”) can justify a near total ban on the right to possess a lawful gun to defend one’s self and family with a firearm in Delaware’s State Parks and Forests. The Agencies not only fail to justify such sweeping regulations, but fail to show that they had the authority to enact such unconstitutional regulations in the first place....
...that, “the need to respond to a threat with a firearm is diminished when firearms are prohibited in the area,,, is premised on the questionable notion -- unsupported by reference to any evidence -- that outlawing possession of firearms in an area makes law-abiding citizens safer because criminals will, for some reason, obey the Regulations.
The writer of the majority opinion, as customary, went on to articulate some of the reasoning.
The Heller Court found “[t]he very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the [citizen's] right [to keep and bear arms] and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed,’” as the Second Amendment “was not intended to lay down a ‘novel principle’ but rather codified a right ‘inherited from our English ancestors.’” Indeed, as explained in Heller, “[b]y the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects.” Blackstone, the prominent authority on English law of the time, “cited the rms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.” Justice Scalia observed that “[Blackstone’s] description of [the right] cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, [Blackstone] said, ‘the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,’ and ‘the right of having and using arms for self- preservation and defence.’”
It is not a historical accident that Delaware’s 1757 Militia Act uses similar language in proclaiming that “[s]elf-preservation is the first Principle and Law of Nature, and a Duty that every Man indispensably owes not only to himself but to the Supreme Director and Governor of the Universe, who gave him a Being...
Although the United States Supreme Court has not expressly decided whether the Second Amendment protects public carry (i.e., carrying arms outside the home), the conclusion that self-defense is the Second Amendment’s “core purpose” suggests that it must allow citizens to be armed outside the home given that “in some circumstances a person may be more vulnerable in a public place than in his own house...
Under intermediate scrutiny, the Agencies have the burden to: first, articulate their important governmental objectives in enacting the Regulations; second, demonstrate that the Regulations are substantially related to achieving those objectives; and, third, show that the Agencies have not burdened the fundamental right to bear arms in self-defense more than is reasonably necessary to ensure that the asserted governmental objectives are met.126 The Agencies are required to show more than a “general safety concern.”
...the Regulations fail as they “burden the right to bear arms more than is reasonably necessary...
I think that Shotgun Joe understands too; he's just not admitting it...
/fl