Maryland Official Bashes ‘Irrational’ Opponents of County’s Gun-Free Zones

Montgomery County, Maryland officials are facing three separate legal challenges over several newly-enacted “gun-free zones,” including parks and houses of worship. Now the county’s chief executive has weighed in with his take on the lawsuits filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the Department of Justice.

Marc Elrich told reporters on Wednesday that the county will defend its restrictions on lawful carry, and had some choice words for those who are trying to get rid of the victim disarmament zones. 

“We’re just not going to surrender,” Elrich said. “If we get to a legal point and we lose in court, we lose in court. But I’m not going to surrender protections for people just because we’re dealing with folks who are irrational.” 

He added that the county’s job “is to try to protect people, and gun legislation is important in accomplishing that.” 

It’s not irrational to want to protect yourself in a public setting. It’s not irrational to believe the government shouldn’t be able to tell private property owners that they must prohibit guns on their premises. And it’s certainly not irrational to think that restrictions that make more than 25 percent of the county’s land area off-limits to lawful carry violates our right to bear arms. 

Montgomery County has already been slapped down by the state Supreme Court because its laws went too far for that liberal bunch of judges. The county was sued after it revised its laws to comply with the Maryland Supreme Court decision that held MoCo violated state law by, among other things, making it illegal for those with carry permits to bear arms in their vehicles as they were traveling on public highways. 

Maryland state law expressly allows localities to impose gun-free status on a variety of locations, and Montgomery County has turned every one into a “sensitive place” where lawful concealed carry is banned. 

Elrich said Wednesday he takes issue with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent interpretations of the Second Amendment. 

“It’s really hard for me to reconcile the Constitution with a blanket, ‘anyone can have a gun anywhere anytime’ kind of mentality, because what the Constitution talks about is a well-regulated militia,” Elrich said.  

It talks about the right of the people to keep and bear arms, with a well-regulated militia being one of the purposes of that right. And if Elrich honestly thinks that the Supreme Court has endorsed a “anyone can have a gun anywhere anytime” reading of the Second Amendment, he’s delusional. I wish that was the case, but SCOTUS hasn’t even come close to that standard. 

He said most people agree on the need to limit guns in certain situations, such as with respect to minors and people who have been convicted of crimes. 

“We’ve gone way far in the other direction away from rationality,” Elrich said.

Neither minors nor convicted felons can obtain a concealed carry license in Maryland, so Elrich’s argument is irrelevant to the issue at hand: can Maryland residents who have obtained the government’s permission to carry a firearm be prohibited from doing so in many places that are open to the public and have no special security in place to assure their safety? 

As Bethesda Today pointed out, Montgomery County Public Schools and the county school board have already been ordered to pay $1.5 million in damages after losing a lawsuit that challenged the district’s policy that forbids students from opting out of lessons that use LGBTQ+ materials that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Is Elrich concerned at all about wasting even more taxpayer dollars defending the county’s “gun-free zones”? 

“Nobody likes spending money unnecessarily,” he said. “But we’re not going to know whether it’s unnecessary until we play this out in court.” 

That’s an idiotic argument. It’s unnecessary because the county could simply repeal these ordinances and err on the side of the Constitution if officials chose to do so. The DOJ’s lawsuit is challenging the ban on carrying in parks, places of worship, libraries, recreational facilities, and multipurpose exhibition facilities as well as the 100-yard “buffer zone” around each of these locations. A Fourth Circuit panel upheld the state’s ban on lawful carry in state parks and in all government buildings earlier this year, so Montgomery County’s carry bans in parks, libraries, recreational facilities, and exhibition facilities owned and operated by local or county government stand a decent chance of being upheld at the district and appellate court level. 

The county’s bans on concealed carry in places of worship, privately-owned exhibition facilities, and the 100-yard buffer zone around every gun-free location in the county, on the other hand, may not even survive the Fourth Circuit’s scrutiny. And if/when the Supreme Court gets ahold of the three lawsuits filed against MoCo’s carry laws, I wouldn’t be surprised if they agree with the DOJ on every one of the “gun-free zones” the agency is challenging. 

Montgomery County is in for a long, expensive, and losing fight. The attorneys’ fees aren’t coming out of Elrich’s pockets though, so it’s not surprising that he’s unconcerned about the cost that taxpayers will bear to defend these “gun-free zones” that won’t stop a single criminal from committing a violent crime. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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