Q&A with Cody Wisniewski, Director of MSLF’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms
Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms launched in late 2020 with a vision to challenge progressives’ relentless anti-gun agenda.
Now that the Center is one year old, we sat down with Cody Wisniewski, an attorney, and the Center’s founding director, to learn what’s next in the battle to defend your Second Amendment-protected rights.
What is the biggest threat to gun ownership in America right now?
More and more we have seen that the real goal of the gun control movement is to end civilian gun ownership.
Gun control advocates are seeking to realize this goal through ever-expanding federal and state regulation. They have also tried to accomplish this by demonizing gun owners for the past few decades—a point that will be more difficult with the recent surge in first-time gun buyers.
In reality, gun owners are simply everyday Americans, who recognize the importance of being able to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Would it be fair to say that the control advocates’ strategy is incremental? Constantly pushing to expand regulations?
Specifically, I expect the most extreme city and state governments to continue trying to push the envelope on local gun control ordinances that they cannot get passed through state legislatures— everything from semi-automatic firearm and magazine bans to carry prohibitions.
Further, we have seen the weaponization of federal agencies under the Biden Administration. The agency rulemaking process, and the proposed redefinition of federal law, poses a huge threat to the types of arms that individuals will be able to acquire and own.
Without a concerted push back against gun control advocates—especially in the court of law—then the individual right to keep and bear arms will continue to be eroded and will eventually suffer death by a thousand cuts.
What role has the U.S. Supreme Court played in recent decades in the battle over the right to keep and bear arms?
Supreme Court precedent is, in effect, the law of the land. The manner in which the Supreme Court interprets the U.S. Constitution is then applied by every federal court in the United States.
The Supreme Court has decided two landmark Second Amendment cases in the past two decades— D.C. v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. Chicago in 2010. Those cases have guided Second Amendment jurisprudence since. But neither of those cases
were intended to clarify the entire field of Second Amendment law.
Since 2010, we’ve been litigating over the bounds and implications of the Heller and McDonald decisions. Now, with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen being considered by the Supreme Court, we have the opportunity to receive clarification on the scope of the Second Amendment’s protections outside the home as well as the appropriate test that lower courts should be applying to address Second Amendment challenges.
