Judge won’t block Missouri law declaring federal gun regulations ‘invalid’
A new Missouri law that declared many federal gun regulations “invalid” can move forward, a state judge ruled Friday despite warnings from the U.S. Department of Justice that the law hinders police work.
Cole County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Green denied a request from Jackson County, St. Louis County and St. Louis City to block the Second Amendment Preservation Act. In a two-page judgment, he cited other ongoing lawsuits in declining to stop the measure.
“The constitutional issues raised in this matter should be litigated (if at all) by each plaintiff in each separate case,” Green wrote.
The state law declares federal gun rules “invalid” if they don’t have an equivalent in Missouri law. These include statutes covering weapons registration and tracking, and possession of firearms by some domestic violence offenders.
It bars local and state police departments from enforcing them, or risk being sued for $50,000. They also are prohibited from assisting federal agents in enforcing “invalid” laws and from hiring former federal agents who had enforced them.
“Today’s ruling was an important victory for the Missouri Attorney General’s Office over the Biden Department of Justice, and for the Second Amendment rights of all Missourians,” Attorney General Eric Schmitt said in a statement.
At an Aug. 19 hearing in Jefferson City, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued the law is threatening public safety and partnerships with federal agents. Police departments feared any work with federal authorities would run afoul of the law and risk lawsuits, for which the local departments could be held liable.
“The likelihood of irreparable harm is quite real and quite urgent,” said Heidi Leopold, an attorney for St. Louis County. “We’re talking about the disbanding of the technologies, manpower, databases that currently county and federal agencies share to help in battling crime. We’re talking about lost prosecutions, lost investigations, lost arrests, lost gun seizures.”
The local governments’ arguments were bolstered by a filing from the U.S. Department of Justice and sworn statement by Frederic Winston, special agent in charge of the Kansas City division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Winston said in response to the new law, a dozen Missouri police officers assigned to work with the ATF have withdrawn from partnerships. Some departments, Winston said, have cut off the ATF from accessing evidence about gun crimes, including shell casing information collected from crime scenes that are entered into a national database used by federal agents to link guns to shootings.
Missouri solicitor general Dean John Sauer, representing Schmitt and Gov. Mike Parson, asked Green to declare the law was validly enacted.
“They say, they’re not sure whether or not certain of these federal partnerships are legal or illegal, but they haven’t filed for a declaratory judgment seeking any clarity about the meaning of the statute,” he said. “They’re just going for the jugular, so to speak.”
Sauer compared the law’s barring of police departments from hiring former federal agents that had enforced the “invalid” gun laws to a prohibition on police departments hiring officers who had violated the civil rights of protesters.
“This is a civil right that’s just politically disfavored in those political subdivisions,” he said.
Schmitt, who is running for U.S. Senate, and Parson previously clashed with the Justice Department over the scope of the law. Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton wrote in a letter to the Missouri officials in June that the state cannot nullify federal gun laws.
The state officials responded that they were only preventing state resources from going toward their enforcement.
This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 12:17 PM.
