Kansas, 2A front lines?

[bignflnut]

WICHITA, KAN. When Shane Cox began selling his homemade firearms and silencers out of his military surplus store, he stamped “Made in Kansas” on them to assure buyers that a Kansas law would prevent federal prosecution of anyone owning firearms made, sold and kept in the state.

The 45-year-old Chanute resident also handed out copies to customers of the Second Amendment Protection Act passed in 2013 by the Kansas Legislature and signed by Gov. Sam Brownback, and even collected sales taxes. His biggest selling item was unregistered gun silencers that were flying out of the shop as fast as Cox could make them, prosecutors said later. One of those customers — 28-year-old Jeremy Kettler of Chanute — was so enthusiastic about the silencer that he posted a video on Facebook.

But last week a jury found Cox guilty of violating federal law for the manufacture, sale and possession of unregistered firearms and silencers. Kettler was found guilty on one count for possessing the unregistered silencer.

The case could reverberate across the country because it cites the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pitting the federal government’s right to regulate firearms against the rights of states. The judge overseeing the case expects it ultimately to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

SNIP

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt has intervened to defend the state law’s constitutionality in the first criminal case that has used the Kansas law as a defense. Schmidt said in a statement that buyers’ reliance on the state law as a defense is “reasonable, and it is consistent with the State’s interest in ensuring the Second Amendment Protection Act itself is defended.”

That state law says firearms, accessories and ammunition manufactured and kept in Kansas are exempt from federal gun control laws. It also made it a felony for the federal government to enforce them.

A day after it took effect, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder advised Brownback that the state law criminalizing federal enforcement of gun laws was unconstitutional.

[bignflnut]

After a decades-long wait, we finally appear to have a case that is likely to see the United States Supreme Court have to directly examine whether the Founding Fathers meant what they said when they wrote amendments to a federal Constitution that was designed to tightly bind and constrict the reach of the federal government.

What most 21st Century Americans simply do not grasp is that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were not written to to give rights to the citizens of our then-new nation, but was instead written to tightly constrain the federal government.