The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a case challenging New York’s arbitrary and corrupt permitting system for carrying handguns. In Heller v. DC and McDonald v. Chicago, they held that the 2nd Amendment protected the right to own firearms.
But those decisions only applied to keeping a gun in the home. The question of whether it protects the right to carry outside the home remains open, and lower courts have done everything in their power to say it doesn’t. That question is central to the arguments in Bruen.
Now Amnesty International has seen fit to submit an amicus brief [pdf] in the current case that is just strange.
It makes three arguments:
U.S. courts should interpret U.S. law, including the Constitution, as consistent with U.S. obligations under international law.
I’m not sure what international law is threatened here, and neither are they since they don’t cite any. They go on to selectively edit the Supremacy Clause to claim that treaties are the “supreme law of the land.”
The United States is obligated by international human rights law to protect those under its jurisdiction from violence by private firearms.
And the government’s current policies are doing a wretched job of that. I find it interesting that we don’t hear them railing against countries like Venezuela or Mexico for their staggering murder rates with firearms. In fact, they fail to provide any sort of explanation as to how a country can do such a thing.
Not weird enough yet? Here’s their third point:
Inadequate State regulation of firearms has a discriminatory effect on African Americans and other minorities and violates U.S. nondiscrimination obligations under international human rights law.
That’s odd because I have several books sitting next to my desk here that detail the racist and discriminatory history of gun regulation in this country. Laws like the one at hand are disproportionately used against minorities, not for them.
(See This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed by Charles Cobb and We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja.)
Measures such as the New York regulations challenged in this case reduce the discriminatory impact of firearm violence by reducing firearm violence itself.
Oh, dear. There is no causal link between New York’s handgun permitting system and rates of shootings. There’s not even any significant correlation. Rates of shootings have fluctuated wildly in the city in the decades since the Sullivan Act was passed in 1911. It didn’t do anything to reduce the violence the city suffered in the 1970s, nor has it done anything to stop the sudden increase in shootings over the last year. All it does is reduce firearms ownership by the poor, and that often means minorities suffer the most.
Amnesty International has supported embargoes on arms shipped to Israel. They claimed to support the Darfuri victims of the Sudanese government but also warned against anyone shipping them guns. They founded Control Arms to support gun control on a global scale.
I’m not sure who asked them to weigh in on this, but they’re just not worth listening to.