According to Firearm Chronicles
Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun law firm, Everytown Law, is trying to convince elected officials around the country to shut down gun stores during the current national emergency, and has sent a letter to state and local officials in charge of enforcing COVID-19 emergency closure orders offering up a strategy and legal argument for those who do so. Fortunately for gun owners, and unfortunately for the gun control lobby, their argument doesn’t stand up to the slightest bit of legal scrutiny.
Everytown’s attorneys argue that gun stores aren’t being singled out for closure when they’re declared non-essential businesses, but instead are just one of many retail establishments that can’t sell their goods. They also point to a Supreme Court decision from 1986 called Arcara v Cloud Books, where justices ruled that a state had the authority to close a book store because it was a “public health nuisance.” While the burden on speech was significant, as the bookstore was forced to shut its doors for a year, that did not change the result. Because the law at issue was directed at conduct “having nothing to do with books or other expressive activity,” the First Amendment simply was not implicated. Similarly, the Supreme Court has held that incidental burdens on the free exercise of religion—even severe ones prohibiting conduct central to an individual’s faith—cannot relieve one of the obligation to comply with a law that is “not specifically directed at . . . religious practice.
The problem for Everytown is that we’re not talking about an incidental burden on the right to keep and bear arms. By ordering gun stores to close, public officials are blocking access to firearms and ammunition to anyone who’s not currently exercising their Second Amendment rights.