Gag on 2nd Amendment Is City’s Aim in Guns Suit

Interesting story from Friday's New York Sun:

"Gag on 2nd Amendment Is City’s Aim in Guns Suit"

From the NYSun story:

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.
“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said.
The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.
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.

This, from John Renzulli, attorney for defendant Adventure Outdoors, a Georgia gun ship which apparently sold a firearm which wound up in the State of New York:

“If you can’t discuss the Bill of Rights in a court of law, where should we discuss these issues? Should we reserve it for the tavern?”
Mr. Renzulli said the city’s lawsuit did implicate the Second Amendment: “The politics involved here is whether the city has the power to go into another state and control the lawful sale of firearms.”

Strangely, however, Attorney Renzulli doesn't intend to oppose The City of New York's motion to exclude reference to the Second Amendment (and we are NOT making this up) :

Mr. Renzulli, who has defended suits against the gun industry in Judge Weinstein’s courtroom before, said that in the past the defense has struck a deal with the plaintiffs on the matter: Lawyers for the gun industry won’t mention the Bill of Rights to the jury, if the plaintiffs don’t mention the National Rifle Association [Emphasis added].

Seems like a strange procedural stalemate to us.

Gun rights activists around the country anxiously await the US Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which was argued before SCOTUS in March of this year, wherein the high court is expected to resolve the constitutional question of whether the Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms'' covers all people or only those affiliated with a National Guard or other state-run militia. The Supreme Court has never squarely addressed that question.

The Supreme Court decision, expected in June, can't come soon enough, we say.