The US Supreme Court handed the city of Chicago a setback earlier this month when it abruptly cancelled a scheduled hearing on the city’s request that the government turn over information on firearms purchases and traces on crime guns.
The high court remanded Chicago’s challenge back to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, giving the appellate court an opportunity to consider the effects of new federal legislation that prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from spending any funds to release the kind of information Chicago is seeking. Chicago wants the data under the Freedom of Information Act as part of its $433 million action against the industry.
However, a leading expert on firearms law, attorney Stephen Halbrook, told Gun Week that legislation already exists to protect the privacy of gunowners, but that government attorneys have not referred to it in this case.
“The Firearm Owners Protection Act has very important privacy provisions, which the appeals court completely ignored,” Halbrook noted. “The government lawyers never brought this provision to the attention of the District Court or Court of Appeals. But (Solicitor General) Ted Olson did bring this provision to the attention of the Supreme Court.”
Olson advised the justices of the privacy protections in the government’s briefs on this case, arguing that release of the names “would substantially intrude upon the privacy interests of hundreds of thousands of individuals, without meaningfully serving any public interest.”
“It took us all the way to the Supreme Court to get that law recognized,” Halbrook said.
Why didn’t government attorneys long ago point to this privacy protection? Halbrook theorized that because the case began when anti-gun former Attorney General Janet Reno ran the Justice Department, attorneys under her command simply ignored the pro-gun statute.
“We would like the Supreme Court to discuss these privacy provisions in the gun control act, and give some life to them,” Halbrook said. “By and large, they’ve never been mentioned in any court decision anywhere.
“It’s a conspiracy of silence,” Halbrook added. “Government lawyers have been adverse to gunowner privacy rights.”
Chicago wants access to the records, contending that the industry can identify gun dealers from whence large numbers of guns later involved in crimes are initially obtained. Some critics suggest Chicago—led by vehemently anti-gun Mayor Richard Daley—actually wants access to the information in order to set up its own national gun registry.
The city is willing to pay for the cost of accessing the records, according to Associated Press. That may nullify any concern the ATF has about violating the congressional mandate against spending money to release the information.
Halbrook acknowledged that the case is far from over, but he suggested that it could take up to a year for this dilemma to be worked out, and it might include an appeals court decision to send the case back down to the federal district court in Chicago, essentially leaving the city “at square one,” he explained.
What the Supreme Court did was simply to send the case back down the court chain, not throw the case out altogether.
Chicago, like many other cities, sued the gun industry in an attempt to recover costs associated with the treatment of gun crime victims, and investigating gun-related crimes. Several other such lawsuits have been thrown out of courtrooms across the country, and Boston, MA, withdrew its case last year, acknowledging that it could find no “smoking gun” evidence that the industry knowingly sold guns to criminals or persons who supply guns to criminals. Several California city suits against the industry have been bundled together into one suit that will begin trial in San Diego in April.
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