Testing the States’ Rights Second Amendment for Content: A Showdown Between Federal Environmental Closure of Firing Ranges and Protective State Legislation
By Nicholas J. Johnson
Publication Date
2004
Abstract
"A majority of recent scholarship supports the view that the United States Constitution recognizes an individual right to possess firearms. ... Thus, even a firing range EPA deems to have little environmental impact may be restricted or closed by actual or threatened private party litigation attacking technical violations of federal law. ... Early on, Judge Wright observed that a defendant who disposed of a penny in a landfill (copper, a common constituent in rifle and pistol bullets, is a CERCLA hazardous substance) was at least jointly and severally liable for the cost of cleaning up the entire mess. ... I will suggest below why if it is to mean anything at all, the SRSA of Silveira must at least privilege particular types of state legislation protecting shooting ranges from federal environmental closure; how if it protects this, it is difficult to avoid protecting a broader range of related arms bearing; and how existing federal gun control legislation is more at risk from state assertions of rights under the SRSA than from an individual right subject to reasonable regulation. ... The question is whether a state militia defense against environmental closure of a shooting range is any different from the failing claim of the newspaper publisher that it should be exempt from federal hazardous waste disposal regulations because they burden publishing."
Recommended Citation
Nicholas J. Johnson, Testing the States' Rights Second Amendment for Content: A Showdown Between Federal Environmental Closure of Firing Ranges and Protective State Legislation, 38 Ind. L. Rev. 689 (2004).
