I’ve often argued that the same people who will swear up and down that they don’t view the Second Amendment as a second-class right are the same people who would push restrictions on gun rights they would never tolerate on their First Amendment rights. I’ll maintain that to my dying day unless things change enough that anti-gunners also start going after more First Amendment rights.
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, however, recently tried to compare the need for permits in order to hold protests with gun control.
On the face of it, that’s a ridiculous comparison to make, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Matt Manda took the chance to absolutely shred it.
Speaking about gun control on a podcast called Unity Over Division, Rep. Talarico gave an odd — and erroneous — comparison involving the First and Second Amendments.
“I am a believer in the Second Amendment. I don’t pick and choose between the Bill of Rights, I believe in the Second Amendment just as much as I believe in the first,” he stated. He continued by suggesting strict gun control was acceptable by stating his belief in why Texans need to “get a permit to exercise the First Amendment right to assemble.”
That comparison is so errant it missed the target by a Texas country mile. Yes, people who wish to hold a rally or protest on municipal grounds must usually apply for a permit to do so from the local city government. But these “time, place and manner” permits are primarily about logistics and resource allocation for public safety and infrastructure management, ensuring participants, and possibly counter protesters, are safe. These permits are not the local government granting or denying permission for applicants to exercise their First Amendment rights. They ensure that participants can exercise their First Amendment rights on city grounds safely.
Conversely, restrictive and overly burdensome gun ownership permitting schemes — the kind with which Rep. Talarico apparently agrees — have been specifically designed in many states to make exercising Second Amendment rights far too costly and time-consuming that law-abiding citizens are priced out of that constitutional right or simply give up trying to exercise it.
Manda also takes a shot at Talarico’s call for mandatory storage laws, noting that mandatory storage was at the heart of the Heller decision, and the law was struck down, though it doesn’t seem Talarico is advocating for guns to be disassembled and unloaded, which was also a big part of the Heller decision. I’m not saying mandatory storage laws are constitutional, only that the differences will make a difference in future legislation.
But, for me, the lion’s share of the scorn has to be directed at this inane idea that, because we require permits for protests that will likely involve a lot of people, that we have some kind of restriction.
As Manda notes above, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, these permits are far more about logistics than anything else. If I want to stand outside of my local courthouse with a sign saying the government is corrupt, I can do that without a permit in most cases. If I get a few thousand of my friends to do it, then it becomes a logistical nightmare, and thus the requirement for a permit.
However, what we also need to remember is that communities can’t discriminate against positions being advocated for with these protests. Literally anyone can get a permit for whatever position they want to advocate for. There’s no attempt to dictate speech or limit who can say what. If a bunch of criminals want to hold a protest saying that prison is unconstitutional and they shouldn’t be punished for murdering people, they have that right. If, say, a group of Illinois Nazis–well-established by the Blues Brothers as the absolute worst–want to march through a heavily Jewish community like, say, Skokie, Illinois, they can legally do so. The government can’t stop them.
So any comparison to permitting requirements is asinine because the very nature of requiring permits is to limit who can exercise their Second Amendment rights.
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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