THE "SENSITIVE AREAS" SCAM
ANTI-GUN STALL TACTIC
By Dave Workman. Jan 20, 2025
Article Source
Five months ago, attorneys representing several gun rights organizations filed a petition for an en banc rehearing of a case they've been fighting in California challenging the state's anti-Second Amendment law designating all kinds of public venues to be "sensitive places" where licensed concealed carry is prohibited.
About the same time and all the way across the country, gun rights groups were jumping into a case known as U.S. v. Ayala regarding the indictment of a Florida postal worker who was prosecuted — and cleared by a federal district court — of carrying a firearm in a federal facility.
These cases came shortly after another case called Christian v. Chiumento was challenging New York's prohibition on lawful concealed carry in public parks and all private property open to the public, such as shopping malls, movie theaters, etc.
Likewise, there was a case unfolding in Illinois where the issue was a concealed carry ban on Illinois Public Transit. For many people, it's the only way they can get around, especially to and from work in Chicago and other urban areas. A case known as Schoenthal v. Raoul was making its way through the federal court. Second Amendment proponents maintain the ban is clearly unconstitutional.
Sneaky Tactic
What's this all about? They are examples of laws passed by fanatical anti-gun legislators who are furiously resisting the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which crushed a hundred-year-old unconstitutional Empire State concealed carry law designed to discourage and prevent concealed carry.
The ruling recognized the existence of so-called "sensitive places" where firearms carry by private citizens might be logically prevented, but the concept was to have been rather narrow. Instead, gun-hating politicians and bureaucrats scrambled to designate as many places as possible as "sensitive" in hopes they'd get away with it.
Groups including the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, Gun Owners of California, Liberal Gun Club, California Rifle & Pistol Association and others were quick to fight back.
SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut, himself a practicing attorney, pretty much explained the issue at the center of this ongoing war against extremist gun prohibitionists.
"We contend that sensitive places are intended to be rare exceptions to the right to carry by private citizens," Kraut said.
We are in a brand new year. There is a new Congress, and we've got a new tenant in the White House, but this is the same old, tired effort to keep Americans disarmed. It's time for this nonsense to stop, even if it takes federal legislation, which narrowly defines a "sensitive place" and carries harsh penalties — such as withholding federal funds — for states that stubbornly continue to deny legally armed citizens the tools they might need in an emergency to defend their lives and the lives of other innocents.
The futility of such designations was dramatically illustrated one year ago this month when, in February 2024, a teenage thug from Venezuela who entered the country in September 2023 was arrested and charged with the shooting of a Brazilian tourist in Times Square. That area of New York City was designated a "sensitive place" by officials who are loathe to the notion of private citizens defending themselves from armed criminals who ignore such designations.
What's wrong with telling people they can't carry firearms for personal protection in public places? The short answer: Everything. Armed private citizens have intervened more often than the media or government officials, either stopping or effectively interrupting violent crimes. For example, who can forget the heroics of 22-year-old Elisha Dicken in July 2022, a month after the Bruen ruling, when he fatally shot a would-be mass killer at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana with a legally carried pistol?
Although that murderer had killed two people with a semiautomatic rifle, Dicken — from a distance of about 40 yards across the mall's food court — fired 10 rounds and connected with eight of them to drop that monster in his tracks. Dicken was subsequently hailed as a hero by local officials.
Some time ago, LawNews.TV put together a list of mass shootings stopped by armed citizens. An article in The Hill back on Nov. 30, 2023 by John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, also reported on violent incidents stopped by "good guys with guns." This does not appear to be as rare a phenomenon as the media and the gun prohibition lobby would have the public believe.
Stupid Is …
Which brings us back around to the point of this month's 2A Defense column. "Sensitive Place" designations are based on the same stupidity that gave us "gun-free zones." They have been proven to cost lives and people who advocate for more such places know this.
Pay attention to the people proposing and adopting such zones. They need to be called out for these actions and forced to justify them. Demand they offer evidence such designations work — because they can't.
While the courts seem to be — albeit reluctantly in some cases — whittling away at these "sensitive places" designations, there should still be a federal law with teeth to discourage anti-gun-rights lawmakers from creating more.
What these people are hoping for are openings on the Supreme Court to be filled with liberal justices to reverse or stop pro-Second Amendment rulings. They are essentially playing a stalling game by adopting laws and regulations they know to be unconstitutional, but which will take time to adjudicate. Their long term goal is to make lawful concealed carry so burdensome as to one day discourage the people from exercising their carry rights. Gun-free/Sensitive place advocates are playing the long game.
The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the federal constitution and a majority of state constitutions. It is not a second-class right, no matter how gun prohibitionists try to make it seem otherwise. It is both an infringement and impairment to designate vast areas of public access as "sensitive." If it takes federal legislation to derail this demagoguery, so be it.
