One of the obligations of the courts in the United States is to guarantee that the US Constitution is followed. If New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his way, though, one court will ban any mention of portions of the framework of American government during the trial of a lawsuit seeking to enforce New York City gun laws against gun shop owners in other states – even though their procedures conform to federal law and the laws of their respective states.

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

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City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states.

In other words, the city is taking the position that a federal court should not allow a little thing like the Constitution to interfere with efforts to infringe upon legal activities that are protected by the Constitution – and that similar state constitutional provisions should not be allowed to interfere with the city’s attempt to interfere with legal activities in other states.

Frankly, the court ought to slap this frivolous motion down with extreme prejudice – and fine Mayor Bloomberg and the lawyers involved in filing it with penalties to be paid from their own pockets. After all, every last period, comma, and semicolon of the US Constitution is always a legitimate matter for lawyers to bring up in a courtroom.

Posted by: Greg at 11:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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