Tennessee legislators are considering a law that would tell the federal government that their gun laws don’t apply to guns manufactured and sold within the state.
It’s called the “Tennessee Firearms Freedom Act.”
It basically exempts guns made and sold in Tennessee from federal regulation, because they never cross the state line.“If these firearms are meant to be used just here in Tennessee, they’re not properly regulated by the federal government because they are not in interstate commerce,” says Rep. Fincher.
“Your state, and I suspect every state, will be rushing to try to do something to preserve the rights of their people,” says Ronnie Barrett with Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Inc.
Montana’s state body passed the bill, and Governor Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, signed it into law.
Texas is trying to pass the same thing.
Here’s the problem, and if you don’t know about this, sit down because it will make you dizzy in disbelief. A product manufactured in a state does not have to leave the state to be part of interstate commerce. It doesn’t even have to be sold.
I’ll give you a minute to digest that before I show you why that is law.
The case in question is Wickard v. Filburn. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 limited the area that farmers could plant wheat on, because they thought doing that would help stabilize the markets. A gentlemen named Roscoe Filburn grew more wheat than the government said he could, but his wheat was for his farm. He never sold it and it never crossed state lines. It didn’t leave his farm.
The Supreme Court ruled against him. It said that if he hadn’t grow his own wheat, he would have had to buy it. Therefore, his lack of purchasing wheat on the open market did have an effect on interstate commerce. That ruling gives Congress the power to regulate “wholly intrastate, non-commercial activity if such activity, viewed in the aggregate, would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, even if the individual effects are trivial.”
This case has been used to prosecute people growing medical marijuana as recently as 2005, in Gonzales v. Raich. It will be used to swat down these uppity states and their ideas of liberty.
