Bloomberg seeks gag order on Second Amendment in gun lawsuit!

NEW YORK - May 9, 2008 - Lawyers for Mayor Michael Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” said Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.

City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states.

Many Americans believe that the Second Amendment provides an individual the right to own a gun. Others believe that it provides no right to private gun ownership, but gives states the power to keep militias.

In a recent court deposition, Mayor Bloomberg said he believed “the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights gives you the right to keep and bear arms.” But in a recent brief to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Mr. Bloomberg argued that the amendment “was not intended to vest armed power in citizens acting outside of any governmental military effort - either federal or state.”

In a statement sent via e-mail to The New York Sun, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said the issue at the upcoming Adventure Outdoors trial “isn’t the Constitution but whether the respondents broke federal firearms laws.”

“The right to bear arms has nothing to do with whether the respondents made straw sales,” said Feinblatt.