Puerto Rico is a tough place to be a gun owner. The NRA and 2nd Amendment Foundation don’t have much reach there, and the Commonwealth is often a laboratory in which the government tests whether or not certain restrictions would fly on the mainland.
Antonio A. Hernández Almodóvar has argued against some of Puerto Rico’s more restrictive firearms laws, but until 2011, the courts have been less than sympathetic. That changed with the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald.
I’d heard about his winning streak, but no translations of the decisions had been made available, and it’s best not to trust Google or Babelfish for these things. This morning, he forwarded me his translations of two cases.
The first is Gunsmiths Association of Puerto Rico, Inc. v. Puerto Rico, reversing a lower court decision that failed to take incorporation into account. It also calls for intermediate to strict scrutiny in examining gun-control laws. Continued...