I’m sure some or most of you have heard of Montana’s Firearms Freedom Act, it was signed into law here in 2009. It was dreamed up by a local gun rights activist Gary Marbut, introduced by State Rep.Joel Boniek (R) and signed into law by Gov.Brian Schweitzer(D) (one of the few things he’s done right). For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is the law in a nutshell: Any firearm manufactured, sold and retained in the State of Montana is not subject to Federal jurisdiction.
Now before any of you armchair Constitutional scholars chime in with “But,but that’s unconstitutional WHAAA“, that’s the whole point of the exercise, that this is not about the Second, but rather that it’s about the Tenth and the Commerce clause.
From the WSJ:
MISSOULA, Mont.—With a homemade .22-caliber rifle he calls the Montana Buckaroo, Gary Marbut dreams of taking down the federal regulatory state. He’s not planning to fire his gun. Instead, he wants to sell it, free from federal laws requiring him to record transactions, pay license fees and open his business to government inspectors.
For years, Mr. Marbut argued that a wide range of federal laws, not just gun regulations, should be invalid because they were based on an erroneous interpretation of Congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In his corner were a handful of conservative lawyers and academics. Now, with the rise of the tea-party movement, the self-employed shooting-range supplier finds himself leading a movement. Eight states have adopted his Firearms Freedom Act, which Mr. Marbut conceived as a vehicle to undermine federal authority over commerce.
Ten state attorneys general, dozens of elected officials and an array of conservative groups are backing the legal challenge he engineered to get his constitutional theory before the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court in San Francisco is now considering his case.
Now that you’re scratchin’ yer scalp and saying “He’s nuttier than a sunstroked stallion two pens down from a mare in heat”, read on because he’s not so nutty.
Mr. Marbut isn’t basing his pro-gun effort on the Second Amendment, the one that talks about a right to bear arms, but on the 10th, which discusses the limits of federal power.
“This is really about states’ rights and federal power rather than gun control,” Mr. Marbut says. There is “an emerging awareness by the people of America that the federal government has gone too far,” he maintains, “and it’s dependent on a really weird interpretation.”
He is talking about the 1942 Supreme Court case of Wickard v. Filburn, which looms for him the way the Dred Scott decision denying rights to blacks did to antebellum abolitionists. The narrow question in 1942 was whether the federal government could regulate wheat a farmer grew for use on his own farm. But the constitutional issue concerned how far Congress’s authority to oversee interstate commerce stretched.
The court ruled Congress could regulate almost any activity that might interfere with national policy. That set the legal basis for a panoply of federal laws.
Check out the video:
Cutting it down to brass tacks here, Gary Marbut is taking aim with a cowboy boot to kick the Feds right in the teeth. Mind the cowpie there boys. You can (and I encourage you to do so) find the full article at WSJ.
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