Federal Judge ruled Massachusetts gun shops can open during COVID-19 pandemic

While shutting down businesses and depriving people of their ability to earn a living during the COVID-19 pandemic many States have declared that gun shops are non-essential businesses and have ordered them to close.

  Massachusetts was one of the States which ordered gun shops to close but today a Federal Judge ruled that gun shops can reopen in the Bay State, here is more:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that gun shops across Massachusetts can reopen this weekend, ruling that Governor Charlie Baker’s decision to shutter them along with thousands of other “nonessential” businesses infringed on people’s Second Amendment rights.

The decision from US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock marked a rare rebuke of Baker and the broad emergency powers he’s wielded to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, during which he’s also shut down school buildings and required millions of people to wear face coverings if they can’t distance themselves from others.

But Woodlock said Baker’s inclusion of firearm retailers among those businesses ordered to close — and his lack of a public explanation for why — created an “improper burden.”

“There’s no justification here,” Woodlock said during a two-hour virtual hearing, arguing he doesn’t see a fit “between the goals of the emergency declared by the Commonwealth and the burdening of the constitutional rights of the defendants in this narrow area.”

“I have enough information to say, in this very small corner of this emergency, we don’t surrender our constitutional rights,” the judge said. “These plaintiffs . . . have constitutional rights that deserve respect and vindication. And it becomes necessary for a court to do that.”

  This is a major victory for the second amendment and our Constitutional rights, however I would say a whole slew of our rights have been violated and I would like to see more challenges in the courts, but I digress.

  The NRA already has lawsuits pending in California and New York over the same issue and this should be an indication that the NRA is going to win those cases as well. If so the three States which are most hostile to the Second Amendment will all suffer humiliating defeats in their attempts to use this crisis to thwart the Second Amendment.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium