The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) has stepped into the legal arena, filing a federal lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder challenging the current federal law prohibiting cross-state handgun purchases.
The lawsuit is a rare move for CCRKBA, acknowledged Chairman Alan Gottlieb. Typically, CCRKBA confines its activities to supporting grassroots activism, allowing local and state organizations to take the lead. Joining CCRKBA as plaintiffs are Texas resident and firearms retailer Fredric Russell Mance, Jr.; Tracey Ambeau Hanson and Andrew Hanson, both of Washington, DC. “It is overreaching, if not downright silly, in today’s environment with the federal instant background check system to perpetuate a prohibition on interstate handgun purchases that has outlived its usefulness,” Gottlieb explained. “If a law-abiding citizen can clear a background check and legally purchase a handgun in his own state, he would pass the same background check just across the border in another state.”
Currently, a person can only buy a handgun from another state if the gun is shipped from one dealer to another, and the final paperwork is done in the buyer’s home state, where the background check is performed. As a firearms retailer in Texas, Mance would sell handguns directly to consumers in other states, the lawsuit notes, but under current law, he is prohibited from doing so. The Hansons are fully qualified under federal law, and laws in Texas and the District of Columbia, to purchase and possess handguns.
For many years, handgun purchases have been treated differently than rifle and shotgun sales. “Federal law allows for interstate long gun sales,” he noted, “as long as the dealer follows the law, so what’s the logic of the federal government banning interstate handgun sales? Some states allow for, or even welcome, interstate handgun sales, so what’s the federal government doing?”
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