WA State: Federal Judge Dismisses Challenge to I-594

I think this one will have to get worked out when someone gets charged. How do you defend yourself if there is no legal precedent and not one single case has been to court. Lets see if any elected prosecutor has the cahones to prosecute something like this. My guess there won't be very many.

Good luck whoever the guinea pig is.

I think a more productive approach may be to have WA exempt CPL holders from the NICS BG check. I believe it's already been approved by ATF, just not implemented.

Standing

That federal judge should throw the case out. HIS COURT is not in a position to accept such a case because it involves a state. The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in such matters. (Article III, Section 2, Clause 2.)

Woody

The Supreme Court's original jurisdiction relates to suit between states, not individuals or organizations suing a state. For example, suits between the states over boundary line disputes caused by a change in the flow of the Ohio River.

It will be nice if they ever actually do some clarification on "transfers". From the article;

Several law enforcement officials have said they wouldn't consider simply handing a gun to someone else a "transfer" requiring a background check under the law, but the law's opponents insist that's not clear.

Bob Calkins, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol, noted that the agency didn't arrest gun rights activists who protested the law by handing each other guns during a recent rally at the Capitol in Olympia. He said law enforcement is most likely to uncover background check violations as they trace the history of guns used in other crimes — not by fielding complaints of I-594 violations directly.

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That's great and all, but my interpretation is that it is still a crime to share shotguns between friends out on your own property while shooting clay pigeons. Or any number of other common occurrences between responsible casual shooters. Sure, they can say they won't "consider" it illegal and point out that nobody has been arrested/prosecuted for it. The law has specified exemptions, and that isn't one of them. Telling us not to worry about it and that it will take someone actually getting in trouble for it before they'll clear up the language is crazy.

CoalTrain49 said:

I think this one will have to get worked out when someone gets charged. How do you defend yourself if there is no legal precedent and not one single case has been to court. Lets see if any elected prosecutor has the cahones to prosecute something like this. My guess there won't be very many.

Good luck whoever the guinea pig is.

Click to expand...

My personal opinion is that first case will be when a gun shows up at a crime scene that was originally sold after law went into effect. It is only a matter of time.

They won't ever come to a clarification on transfers UNLESS they actually make an arrest and press charges based on an illegal transfer per the I-594 law.

The easiest way to avoid any serious challenge to this law, now that it's in place, is to avoid just this sort of issue.

I rather suspect that any actual charges of an illegal transfer under I-594 will be as additional charges to more serious ones. This makes challenging the law by someone extremely difficult. What an attorney really needs to challenge the law is someone who is an otherwise upstanding citizen (at least no criminal history) whose only criminal involvement has to do with I-594 issues.

You won't see many attorneys trying to battle something like I-594 by using hardened criminal cases.

I for one have seen many, many guns sold private party at flea markets/garage sales/face to face transfers post I594. People are ignorant of the "law" and about 90% of the ones that arent ignorant ignore it entirely. I've never seen a "law" so widely ignored. No one in the courts wants to deal with it either. Heck, the Attorney General doesnt want to touch on it...