Lessons From The Legal Eagles

As September 2022 flowed into October, I spent four intense days in Texas amongst some of the finest warriors of both the courtrooms and the legislatures. I was soaking up wisdom on gun laws and the culture war most commonly known as “gun control” as the State Bar of Texas hosted their annual Firearms Law Seminar in Austin for two days.

Then, in Dallas, Friday of that week was taken up by the Legal Scholars Conference and the weekend, by the Gun Rights Policy Conference at the same venue. I’ll try to hit the strongest take-aways from each.

Bar Non

For the State Bar program led by Mark Correro, legendary Supreme Court lawyer and Second Amendment champion Stephen Halbrook spoke on 2A in the Supreme Court, a topic on which few have more experience. My impression — we’re winning on balance, but this is still going to be a long, expensive and complicated fight.

I gave a talk on how default strategies for upholding a client’s rights — never put him or her on the stand, withhold your opening statement until the prosecution has closed, claim accident or impairment — are sub-optimal for the genuine self-defense case. Judge Marilea Lewis moderated a panel that included attorneys Fred Adams and Roderique Hobson. The bottom line: Texas is a great state for gun people, but things still ain’t perfect.

Attorney Sean Healy spoke on regaining lost gun ownership rights. He noted it can be done, but it’s an uphill fight. Hunter Smith and the redoubtable Darlene Payne Walker spoke on disposition of firearms in divorces and inheritances: Have your last will and testament in order in excruciating detail!

Lawyer Jim Willi focused on gun trusts, from which my big take-away was have the paperwork done by an attorney who specializes in that area and don’t try to do it yourself online. Other experts covered castle doctrine principles, and firearms and tort liability, the latter by the outstanding Sabrina Karels, whose lecture I had caught in the past.

The big lesson: Most homeowner liability won’t cover self-defense shootings, which are intentional acts and therefore generally excluded from coverage. Unfortunately, all this was on the second day, when I had to be in Dallas. However, the paper version of Paul Martin’s lecture on post-self-defense support groups can be found here at tinyurl.com/mdaaz3tf

Legal Scholars Conference

The Second Amendment Foundation hosted this event with an all-star cast of Second Amendment champions like David Kopel and many more. Legendary 2A pioneers like Bob Cotroll and David Hardy were there, still plugging after all these decades, joined by some younger courtroom warriors who’ve been instrumental in legal victories. The “scholars” appellation derives from the fact SAF founder Alan Gottlieb was the visionary who in the 1970s began encouraging and funding scholarship in the legal journals, confirming the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right. This led directly to gun owners’ civil rights victories in Heller v. District of Columbia and McDonald v. City of Chicago leading ultimately to the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen, which sounded the death knell for the elitist “may issue” model of concealed carry permitting. Now the egalitarian “shall issue” model is the law of the land.

It was encouraging to hear from the insiders. Governor Hochul in New York State had responded to Bruen by ramrodding through legislation making concealed carry even by permit holders a felony in any establishment without

signage expressly authorizing the practice — essentially rendering the permits null and void. All of us present agreed it was unconstitutional and most of us expected it to take a long time for it to be ruled so. But some of the insiders smiled and said it might be reversed sooner than we thought. They were right: Less than a week later, a Federal judge ruled Hochul’s law unconstitutional and issued a temporary restraining order against enforcing it.

GRPC

Gottlieb and the late Joe Tartaro, giants in the fight for gun owners’ civil rights, created the Gun Rights Policy Conference to bring together everyone on our side of the fight. Hundreds attended for 2022, the first time in two years that we could do it in person instead of virtually. Pro-2A folks from local level and state level as well as national got to network again in person. A live-stream was also available and at least 10,000 people tuned in to watch from home or office. I’m told it was broadcast on C-Span to many more. And I won’t discuss it further, because you can watch it yourselves, archived on YouTube, from beginning to end, thanks to the efforts of 2A advocates Paul Lathrop and Charles Heller. Go to YouTube and type in “GRPC 2022.” I urge you to watch it.

In the next of these columns, we’ll go back to the topic of handguns. But we must all remember in order to keep those handguns — and the other firearms so many Americans died over the centuries to preserve our right to own in the first place — we all need to stay involved in the fight for gun owners’ civil rights, and the fundamental human right of protecting ourselves and our loved ones.

Subscribe To GUNS Magazine

Purchase A PDF Download Of The GUNS Magazine April 2023 Issue Now!

RELATED ARTICLES