BELLEVUE, WA – Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO)—a project of the Second Amendment Foundation—has released a new study showing there is “no association between increased lawful firearm sales and rates of crime or homicide.”

The study, by DRGO member Mark Hamill, MD, FACS, FCCM, is titled “Legal Firearm Sales at State Level and Rates of Violent Crime, Property Crime, and Homicides” and is published in the Journal of Surgical Research. Dr. Hamill worked with a team of nine other doctors to reach their conclusions.

“This confirms what those of us already know who follow all the research by medical, criminology and economic experts,” said DRGO Executive Director Dr. Robert Young. “Lawful gun possession is in no way related to homicide or other crime rates, and the constant drumbeat of anti-gun researchers and activists is a house built on sand.”

“DRGO is an important project of the Second Amendment Foundation,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “because anti-gun billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg are funding research that tries to portray guns and gun ownership as a disease.”

The new report is based on a detailed, objective 50-state analysis of data from the National Instant Background Check System, the Department of Justice Uniform Crime Reporting program, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System covering the years 1999-2015.

Dr. Hamill is an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Nebraska, a longtime gun owner and a law enforcement officer in his previous career. His experience, expertise and thoroughness makes his team’s findings unimpeachable. In 2019, he published earlier research, “State Level Firearm Concealed-Carry Legislation and Rates of Homicide and Other Violent Crime” in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. In this, he and his co-authors do the same careful work analyzing 30 years of data state-by-state. Read more

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NSSF®, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, filed suits against the attorneys general of Delaware and New Jersey, challenging recently-enacted “public nuisance” laws in both states that are “specifically designed to evade the judgment of Congress – and the Constitution.”

Both Delaware and New Jersey enacted public nuisance laws allowing the state and private parties to sue firearm manufacturers for the harm caused by the criminal misuse of lawfully sold firearms. In 2005, Congress barred these sorts of baseless lawsuits when it passed the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). Delaware and New Jersey’s laws are preempted by the PLCAA under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

Public nuisance lawsuits brought by municipalities against members of the firearm industry arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s to “regulate through litigation.” None of those dozens of lawsuits, including those by Wilmington, Del., and Newark, Camden County and the City of Camden, N.J., were successful. These municipal lawsuits intended to bankrupt the industry members or, through the massive cost of litigation, force them to accept settlement agreements that contained gun control provisions rejected by Congress and not supported by the American public. Delaware and New Jersey’s new laws are a blatant and unconstitutional attempt to return to an era of “regulation through litigation.” Read more

BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today said the Biden White House’s call for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” in response to the murder of three University of Virginia students in which a handgun was used is “a dishonest exploitation of a tragedy in a deplorable effort to advance Joe Biden’s gun ban agenda.”

“This isn’t a case of Joe Biden making a typical gaffe,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This was a deliberate attempt by the administration to advance a cause to which Biden has been committed since he arrived in Washington 50 years ago.

“Joe Biden often doesn’t even know what state or country he’s in,” Gottlieb added, “but he knows exactly what he’s doing whenever an opportunity to push gun control comes along. And he is constantly disingenuous about it. Even the anti-gun-rights Washington Post has called Biden out for lying about guns by giving him multiple Pinocchio awards.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement in which she blatantly politicized the triple slaying that took the lives of Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis, Jr.

“Too many families across America are bearing the awful burden of gun violence,” the statement said. “Earlier this year, President Biden signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades, in addition to taking other historic actions. But we must do more. We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets. House Democrats acted, and the Senate should follow.”

“This horrible crime had absolutely nothing to do with so-called ‘assault weapons,’ and the White House knows it,” Gottlieb said. “The statement, which the president had to have approved, amounts to a crass exploitation of a tragedy in a deplorable effort to advance Joe Biden’s gun ban agenda. He has fully embraced the despicable tactic of never letting a crisis go to waste, no matter how awful the situation. Read more

BUFFALO, NY – Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that United States District Judge John Sinatra, Jr. has issued a preliminary injunction against New York’s ban on guns in “any place of worship or religious observation.” The order in Hardaway v. Nigrelli, which is effective immediately and comes two weeks after a temporary restraining order was issued in this case, can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

“For these reasons, New York’s place of worship exclusion ‘violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms,’” wrote Judge Sinatra in his opinion. “The State’s renewed opposition offers nothing to change the outcome. Thus, Plaintiffs remain likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claim.”

“Here, a stay pending appeal is not warranted,” he went on to write. “As discussed above, Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights are being violated absent a preliminary injunction. The State fails to establish irreparable injury in the absence of a stay. The balance of hardships and public interest weigh in favor of Plaintiffs, also as discussed above. Finally, it is Plaintiffs who have demonstrated that they are likely to succeed on the merits. Legislative enactments may not eviscerate the Bill of Rights. Every day they do is one too many.” Read more

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today filed an amicus brief in support of a District of Columbia resident’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the city’s ban on carrying handguns within its public transportation system. The case is known as Angelo v. District of Columbia.

“The District of Columbia’s ban on the carrying of handguns within its public transportation system (the ‘Metro ban’) is flatly unconstitutional under the plain text of the Second Amendment and binding case law,” writes attorney and SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. The brief was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

District residents Gregory Angelo, Robert Miller, Cameron Erickson, and Tyler Yzaguirre are seeking a preliminary injunction and summary judgment to prevent the city from further enforcement of the ban. The District maintains that metro transportation, which includes buses and the subway system, falls within the definition of “sensitive places” where firearms can be prohibited, simply because they are often crowded, transport federal employees, and they are used by school students to go to and from schools. Kraut’s brief says this argument “misses the mark.” Read more