Mary­land Hand­gun Per­mit Restric­tions Found Uncon­sti­tu­tional by Fed­eral Judge.

Happy
details from the Asso­ci­ated Press:

Maryland’s require­ment that res­i­dents show a “good and
sub­stan­tial rea­son” to get a hand­gun per­mit is uncon­sti­tu­tional,
accord­ing to a fed­eral judge’s opin­ion filed Monday.

States can chan­nel the way their res­i­dents exer­cise their Sec­ond
Amend­ment right to bear arms, but because Maryland’s goal was to
min­i­mize the num­ber of firearms car­ried out­side homes by lim­it­ing
the priv­i­lege to those who could demon­strate “good rea­son,” it had
turned into a rationing sys­tem, infring­ing upon res­i­dents’ rights,
U.S. Dis­trict Judge Ben­son Everett Legg wrote.

“A cit­i­zen may not be required to offer a ‘good and sub­stan­tial
rea­son’ why he should be per­mit­ted to exer­cise his rights,” he
wrote. “The right’s exis­tence is all the rea­son he needs.”

Plain­tiff Ray­mond Wool­lard obtained a hand­gun per­mit after
fight­ing with an intruder in his Hamp­stead home in 2002, but was
denied a renewal in 2009 because he could not show he had been
sub­ject to “threats occur­ring beyond his res­i­dence.”
Wool­lard appealed, but was rejected by the review board, which
found he hadn’t demon­strated a “good and sub­stan­tial rea­son” to
carry a hand­gun as a rea­son­able pre­cau­tion. The suit filed in 2010
claimed that Mary­land didn’t have a rea­son to deny the renewal and
wrongly put the bur­den on Wool­lard to show why he still needed to
carry a gun.

The Sec­ond Amend­ment Foun­da­tion
spon­sored the suit, and Woollard’s lawyer was Sec­ond Amend­ment
vin­di­ca­tor Alan Gura, who also won the
Heller and
McDon­ald
suits at the Supreme Court that estab­lished our right to own
com­monly used weapons for self-defense in the home, against both
fed­eral and state encroach­ment. By mov­ing the Sec­ond Amend­ment
argu­ment here beyond the home, this case promises to help expand
Sec­ond Amend­ment rights even beyond the Heller and
McDon­ald standard.

My July 2009
inter­view with Gura. My 2008 book on the Heller case,

Gun Con­trol on Trial.

UPDATE: Thanks com­menter Chris Bren­nan:

The full deci­sion.

[Hit and Run]

It will be inter­est­ing to see where this goes (if any­where) as Cal­i­for­nia has roughly the same law. In prac­tice, “good and sub­stan­tial rea­son” is a euphemism for “rich and/or pow­er­ful.” For exam­ple, some years ago I was told that I could get a con­cealed weapon per­mit in Orange County for a $15,000 bribe “cam­paign contribution”–certainly not a sum that an ordi­nary per­son stuck liv­ing in a high-crime neigh­bor­hood could read­ily afford. Iron­i­cally, that price was too low, and that sher­iff was ejected from office for it.

The good news for us peas­ants is that the gov­ern­ment seems to have finally caught on that they really don’t need to worry about an armed cit­i­zenry demon­strat­ing the pur­pose of the Sec­ond Amend­ment, for the rea­son I quoted a few years ago, but it is a good way to lose the next elec­tion. While elec­tions are mean­ing­less in terms of their impact on the gov­ern­ment, they do mat­ter to the indi­vid­ual politi­cian who losses his place on the gravy train.

His­tory of Copy­right [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

Given the recent fuss raised by cor­rupt politi­cians (SOPA and ACTA) and thugs enforc­ing the “laws” of the Evil Empire on its pup­pet states, its inter­est­ing to look at this seven part series on the his­tory of copyright.

Fea­ture: A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmit­i­gated gall” derailed one man’s life.

High-tech entre­pre­neur Peter Adekeye’s year­long night­mare began after he dropped his wife off at the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional air­port and headed down­town to The Wedge­wood, a posh bou­tique hotel. Inside a taste­ful board­room adorned with gilt-framed mir­rors, the US Dis­trict Court for North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, San Jose divi­sion, had con­vened a spe­cial sit­ting to hear Adekeye’s depo­si­tion as part of a mas­sive antitrust action he had launched against his for­mer employer, the com­puter giant Cisco Sys­tems. An offi­cial court video cam­era recorded the pro­ceed­ings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affa­bly answer­ing ques­tions in an ele­gant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, how­ever, two plain­clothes women—the shorter one bran­dish­ing a badge—and two uni­formed police offi­cers entered the room. Adek­eye was con­fused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the spe­cial judi­cial mas­ter con­duct­ing the hear­ing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

“I’m from the RCMP,” the taller woman said, “I’m sorry I have to inter­rupt your meet­ing here.”

[Ars Tech­nica]

From this arti­cle we learn that if you annoy Cisco, by bring­ing a law­suit against them for exam­ple, they can get the KGB’s immi­gra­tion peo­ple to keep you out of the coun­try (and away from the court­room), and if you find a workaround for that they can get a pros­e­cu­tor to charge you with a phony “crime” and arrest you in the mid­dle of tes­ti­fy­ing for the law­suit (thus keep­ing you from being heard). Clearly Cisco is get­ting their money’s worth from their bribes “cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions” to elected officials.

In the end their use of bla­tant cor­rup­tion didn’t help Cisco, as they still lost the law­suit, so appar­ently their bribes where misplaced–it seems like it would have been more effec­tive for them to bribe the judge in the law­suit. Still, this case pro­vides an exam­ple of how cor­rupt the US legal sys­tem is, and how it can be sub­verted by an orga­ni­za­tion with a lot of money.

From the August 2010 issue of Rea­son Mag­a­zine:

“It’s a dou­ble stan­dard,” Akram Allos, owner of Sin­bad Café in Dear­born, com­plained to the Detroit Free Press. “Just because we didn’t have a lob­by­ist, why should we have to suffer?”

That is why you have to suf­fer, Mr. Allos. Wel­come to the land of the fee and the home of the slave.

These peo­ple are so crooked they screw their socks on in the morning…

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