There was the U.S. before last year’s landmark Bruen decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and then there’s now. The high court ruled, among other things, that people have a Second Amendment right to bear arms as it explicitly says.

That clear decision, however, only spurred state and local governments to find new and novel ways to circumvent the law.

And that led to the current fight in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals with Montgomery County, Maryland.

County officials are twisting their legal logic into pretzels attempting to convince a judge to ignore the obvious. The case centers around the new so-called “gun-free zones” imposed on law-abiding residents.

The county’s argument, if it can even be called that, is that having an unloaded firearm locked in the trunk of your car is the same thing as carrying the weapon on your person. And the map, with gun-free zones highlighted in red by the Firearms Policy Coalition, shows how oppressive the county statute is.

The evidence provided by the map is so obvious that Montgomery County reportedly asked that it be thrown out.

The county’s weak response was that police are exempt and citizens can carry if the gun is locked and separated from ammunition. Officials said they opposed the map due to it being included in a separate filing challenging the expansive list of “sensitive places” where guns are prohibited.

The claim is that the map is erroneous and features “numerous, readily apparent errors in both its methodology and conclusions.” That, of course, is for the court to decide.

The law restricts even carry permit holders from possessing their weapons within 100 yards of a public assembly. And the definition of “public assembly” changed dramatically.

Now it includes both public and private spaces such as parks, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, conference centers and a laundry list of other locations.

The filing featuring the controversial map asserts that “it is literally impossible to drive in or through the County…with a firearm without quickly entering one or more of these 100-yard exclusionary zones.”

Plaintiffs noted that the downtown area is almost completely a “no-go zone.”

As those challenging the onerous law correctly noted, Bruen powerfully confirmed that “there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a ‘sensitive place.’”

Further, Montgomery County apparently does not recognize the chasm of difference between transporting an unloaded firearm and having a weapon on your person for self-defense.

There is a vast disconnect between the county’s defense and its quite public stance on the Bruen decision. On the one hand, officials argue in the Fourth Circuit that the law does not unconstitutionally inhibit citizens’ rights to possess firearms. But on the other hand, leaders in no uncertain terms expressed their vehement displeasure with the Supreme Court majority in Bruen.

As the plaintiffs noted, the county executive was clear in his opposition to the ruling. 

The bill’s sponsor, the city council president, bemoaned the decision as one that stood in the way of county actions to “prevent someone’s Second Amendment right from infringing on the right of me and my family to go to a movie theater without having to wonder or worry about someone sitting next to me is carrying a gun on them.”

Interestingly, there have reportedly been over 40 carjackings in Montgomery County so far in 2023. So much for violent criminals respecting “gun-free” zones.

It is unconscionable that anti-gun state and local leaders work so hard to ignore the clear intent of the Supreme Court. Justice would be the Fourth Circuit ruling that county officials far overstepped their bounds and restoring Second Amendment freedoms for those who abide by the law.