Sullum on Why Gun Rights Groups Oppose Gun Ban for Trans People

We tend not to get too deep into the weeds on LGBT-based political stuff. I get annoyed by the politics of it, to be honest, and while I know people in all of those groups and count them as friends, the political entity that tends to try to speak for all of them tends to utter crap that I’d rather not hear.

However, something I touched on earlier today was the trans gun ban that was proposed.

In short, it was a terrible idea to even float, and I happen to think it did a lot of damage to gun rights in the long term, particularly for Republicans.

But one good thing was how gun rights groups universally opposed the suggestion. 

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum got into why they opposed it.

It is therefore not surprising that the NRA took a dim view of the Justice Department discussions, saying it “does not” and “will not” support “sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.” Under “federal statutes and binding Supreme Court precedent,” the Firearms Policy Coalition warned, “the government cannot impose a categorical ban on an entire class of peaceable people.” The Justice Department’s trial balloon elicited similar complaints from Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Even if Congress approved a transgender gun ban, it is hard to see how it would be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the Second Amendment test that the Supreme Court established in 2022. Since then, several federal appeals courts have ruled that categorical statutory bans on gun ownership, whether based on illegal drug use or criminal convictions, may be unconstitutional as applied to specific individuals.

In one of those cases, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit held that “nothing in our tradition allows disarmament simply because [someone] belongs to a category of people” that “Congress has categorically deemed dangerous.” Such a ban would be even more constitutionally questionable if it were imposed by bureaucratic fiat.

Bingo.

See, the problem with trying to decide everyone in a group is dangerous because some people in that group happen to be dangerous is, at best, a slippery slope. Take the bigotry and whatnot out of the equation, and what you get is an opportunity for abuse that can and will be implemented.

For example, how long before someone tries to make the argument that black people should be disarmed because they’re disproportionately convicted of violent crimes? How long before white people are disarmed by law because most mass killers are white?

“But transgender is a mental illness,” would, undoubtedly, be the response.

Now, let’s understand that nothing in the diagnosis for transgenderism lists a propensity for violence, either against themselves or others. Yet even if we somehow accepted that it doesn’t matter, guess who else could be linked with violence? People with depression are the people who tend to kill themselves, even if most people who suffer from the condition never do.

Can you start to see the slope?

Well, gun rights organizations sure as hell did. Sullum points it out because of the simple fact that such a measure isn’t consistent with our history or tradition of gun regulation in this country. While we might accept disarming people the courts deem dangerous due to their mental illnesses, even if they’re unintentionally so, there’s no mechanism for a blanket determination.

Nor should there be.

Editor’s Note: Despite this one misstep, President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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