While most of the news coverage in Minnesota having to deal with guns these days revolves around the push for a semi-auto ban in the wake of the recent shooting at a Catholic church in Minneapolis, the Pioneer Press is calling attention to the upcoming sentencing for a woman who pled guilty to straw purchasing multiple firearms for her boyfriend, who went on to murder a Burnsville firefighter and two police officers before taking his own life last February.
Ashley Dyrdahl will be sentenced on federal charges this Wednesday and could face up to a decade behind bars, but the Pioneer Press is pushing the idea that a gun rationing law might have prevented her from making the purchases in the first place.
Based on federal and Minnesota laws, it doesn’t appear there were mechanisms in place that would have drawn law enforcement attention to her purchases.
“This case really demonstrates the ways that gaps in firearm safety laws can put law enforcement at risk,” said Spencer Myers, an attorney with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Gun safety advocates point to laws in other states that limit the number of firearms people can purchase in one month, which would have affected Dyrdahl because she bought the two guns that Gooden used in the killings in a span of less than three weeks.
At most, a gun rationing law would have limited Dyrdahl to a single straw purchase on multiple occasions, but it wouldn’t have prevented the straw buy at all. And given that Dyrdahl purchased two firearms in October 2023 and another pair in January 2024, she still could have supplied her boyfriend with four guns even with a gun rationing law in place.
The reporters just blow right by that fact, though many paragraphs later, the Pioneer Press does mention that “California had a law that said most people could not buy more than one firearm in a 30-day period, but a federal court of appeals struck down the law in June.” The reporters didn’t bother, however, to elaborate on the court’s reasoning. As a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit held:
The Second Amendment expressly protects the right to possess multiple arms. It also protects against meaningful constraints on the right to acquire arms because otherwise the right to “keep and bear” would be hollow. And while Bruen does not require a “historical twin” for a modern firearm regulation to pass muster, 597 U.S. at 30, here the historical record does not even establish a historical cousin for California’s one-gun-a-month law.
The appellate court denied California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s request for an en banc rehearing, which meant that for the first time in over 50 lawsuits the Ninth Circuit finally found a gun control law that goes too far.
If the Pioneer Press is on board with gun rationing, it should at least explain to its readers why it’s pushing for a law that would almost certainly be struck down if enacted by Minnesota legislators.
The paper also brought up the fact that the ATF form buyers have to fill out when purchasing a gun from an FFL “does not ask if a buyer lives with someone prohibited from possessing firearms, and federal law does not prevent a lawful gun owner from residing with someone who cannot legally have guns,” insinuating that too might have blocked the sale.
Of course, the reporters didn’t speculate on how a law like that would be proactively enforced without violating our Fourth Amendment rights. Do they envision police having the power to inspect the homes of every gun owner to see if they’re living with a prohibited person, or do they know some magical way for law enforcement to determine that a prohibited person is residing with a legal gun owner?
A prohibition like that would undoubtably run into legal challenges of its own, which might explain the paper’s reluctance to delve too deeply into the issue, but why bring it up at all? The reporters seem desperate to find some gun control measure that might have prevented these straw purchases, but the only law they could come up with is one that doesn’t survive scrutiny under the Second Amendment… and even then wouldn’t have actually stopped a single straw buy from taking place.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about gun control and our Second Amendment rights.
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