DIVIDE OR CONQUER
He claimed that the Maryland law
violated not only his client’s Second Amendment rights, but also
the rights of everyone who had
ever been rendered ineligible to
own a firearm because of a common-law misdemeanor.
The D.C. Circuit rejected Gura’s
argument, and the judge writing the opinion issued a scathing
decision in which he said that if
Gura had simply focused on reinstating his client’s gun rights, they
would likely have agreed with him.
“It’s the luck of the draw in
the judges,” said Gottlieb, adding, “That’s true in a lot of these
cases. But I think the ruling is
stupid, and I’m 100 percent confident we’re going to win [in the
end]. In fact, that’s going to be
one of our easier wins.”
The SAF is also being more
aggressive than the NRA about
which cases it takes on. As of midFebruary, the SAF was a party to
at least 18 gun rights cases pending in trial and appellate courts,
while the NRA was a party in just
nine open cases. This is remarkable, considering that the SAF’s
total operating budget was $4
million in 2010 (the most recent
year for which figures are available), an amount that pales in
HUFFINGTON
04.07.13
comparison to the NRA’s $243
million budget that year.
Gottlieb insisted the SAF has
the resources it needs to fight
this many cases and said the
group reinvests any legal fees it
wins into more litigation. “Right
now, we have about 10 attorneys
working on our cases, and we’re
paying them all,” he said.
But according to professor Winkler, “there’s an element of SAF’s
strategy that’s ‘spaghetti on the
wall,’ in that they’re filing too
“THEY’VE SAID YOU CAN HAVE
A GUN, AND YOU CAN HAVE
A GUN IN YOUR HOME, SO
THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP IS TO SEE
WHERE ELSE YOU CAN HAVE ONE.”
many lawsuits, and in a lot of these
cases they’re getting bad results.”
The SAF’s blueprint for litigation is “overly aggressive and potentially reckless,” said Klukowski,
the former NRA staffer who emphasized that he does not speak on
behalf of the NRA. In the long run,
he said, “the SAF endangers the
Second Amendment by going out
on a limb and going into tangents
and overdriving its headlights.”