When is a gun ban not a gun ban?
A few years ago, anti-gun politicians tried to pass a state-level Lautenberg gun ban similar to the one Sen. Schoenbeck has sponsored this year.
But gun owners like you stopped them cold. Now the politicians have adopted a new tactic: they are trying to tell you that Sen. Lee Schoenbeck’s gun ban isn’t really a gun ban.
In reality, the Schoenbeck ban is a version of the federal Lautenberg gun ban, which was passed by Congress in 1996. Ever since then, the federal ban has been retroactively applied to permanently prohibit firearms possession by anyone who has ever been convicted of a “domestic violence” misdemeanor.
The federal ban has often been enforced against folks who have not committed any true act of violence. Spouses who were involved in nothing more than a loud disagreement and mothers who committed the crime of spanking their children have been permanently stripped of their right to bear arms in self-defense.
Now, politicians and bureaucrats in Pierre want to write this horrendous ban into South Dakota law. They claim that the Schoenbeck ban will help gun owners by preempting the federal life-time ban.
Larry Pratt, Executive director of Gun owners of America, refers to this as Schoenbeck’s Urban Legend.
“There is absolutely nothing in Federal law which would require Federal officials to lift the lifetime ban, based on the fact that a state had adopted a comparable shorter ban. The idea that a state version of Lautenberg will get the state out from under the Federal law is an Urban Legend,” Mr. Pratt stated in a memo to South Dakota Gun Owners.
“In years past, several states passed their own version of the Instant Background Check, and a leading argument was that the Feds would leave the matter to the state. But the citizens in states that chose to duplicate Federal law now suffer under double the restrictions. Obviously, this is part of the same Urban Legend,” says Pratt.
Proponents of the Schoenbeck gun ban claim that the BATF generally waives the federal life-time ban and allows someone to have a gun again if that person has been subjected to a shorter state-level ban. But they have not produced one single specific case, either in this state or in any other, where anyone has had their gun rights restored because of a state gun ban.
BATF documents, such as the yellow form 4473, state that a person “who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence is not prohibited from purchasing, receiving or possessing a firearm if the person has had civil rights (the right to vote, sit on a jury and hold public office) restored.”
If the real objective of Schoenbeck’s legislation is to exempt South Dakota citizens from the federal lifetime ban, why not follow BATF guidelines? These guidelines clearly recognize the loss and restoration of the rights to vote, sit on a jury and hold public office as a qualification for exemption from the Lautenberg ban.
So why are Schoenbeck and other proponents so insistent about creating a new state-level gun ban? Not only is the Schoenbeck gun ban a complete infringement of the right to bear arms, it is absolutely unnecessary to their stated goal of helping victims of the federal Lautenberg ban.
The answer to bad federal law is not to duplicate it in state law. Such a state-level ban would be of very dubious benefit to the gun owners of the state. It would, however, create new penalties in addition to those which now exist on the federal level. If it is passed in South Dakota, the proposed ban could increase the penalty for anyone who has been trapped by the federal ban and who subsequently uses a firearm for self-defense. They could then be convicted under both state and federal law and suffer double the penalty.
The Schoenbeck gun ban would also undermine efforts to repeal the current federal ban. Gun owners across the nation are uniting in this growing national movement, but gun control proponents are countering this effort by working to ratify the Lautenberg gun ban state by state. We must not allow this unconstitutional federal law to be further entrenched by writing it into the laws of South Dakota.
There has been a lot of misinformation spread about the Schoenbeck ban. If any of the politicians have been trying to blow smoke in your face, please click here to read the facts.