Perspectives on Supreme Court Cases with Attorney Menashe Sasson

Sasson MenasheInterview by Gila Hayes

The Network is blessed to be associated with attorneys who genuinely care about liberty and that passion is reflected in our most popular monthly column, the Attorney Question of the Month. Since affiliating with us in 2013, once or twice a year, Dallas, TX attorney Menashe Sasson contributes to the column, and when that happens, anyone who loves to learn, puts on their reading glasses, grabs a pen and note pad and settles in to study, because his contributions are supported with detailed citations and explanations of the law or laws bearing on the topic under discussion. His commentaries expose us as laypersons to the language of the law and what it means. Maybe that’s not too surprising because Mr. Sasson was a police officer and major crimes detective for 12 years before attending law school. Before that, he served in the U.S. military, and he is an NRA-certified pistol, concealed carry, and rifle instructor and range safety officer.

A lot of Mr. Sasson’s cases concern folks who have background issues that prevent them from passing a 4473 gun purchase background check. That’s pertinent because it is not unusual for callers to the Network to say they’d like to become armed citizens, but they’re prohibited from possessing firearms. While our work on behalf of members is 100% focused on the legal defense of use of force in self defense and doesn’t entail restoration of rights or getting permits to carry, the questions arise so that it is well worthwhile to ask him how Supreme Court decisions build on previous cases, and how some create openings for additional litigation. Let’s switch now to our Q & A format and learn from Attorney Menashe Sasson in his own words. For members preferring video, we’ve posted a longer, informal discussion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68SDp6d3CzA .

eJournal: Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us today. What should we know about you besides the fact that reading this doesn’t create an attorney-client relationship?

Sasson: I want to emphasize this is for educational purposes. I can’t give legal advice to anybody because this is just really not an appropriate forum for that, but we do encourage learning.

Today, I want to start out talking about several different cases and how they fit together and show the progression of the law.

A lot of non-lawyers, laypeople if you will, hear that the Supreme Court decided X or that the Supreme Court decided Y, and for them that’s the end of it. In reality, the law is not just one discrete case; it’s reading cases together, seeing the development, seeing how they work together, and sometimes how they do not work together. That is where I’d like to start today.

eJournal: In preparing for this interview, you used the term “a trilogy” to describe a series of Second Amendment cases the Supreme Court decided. I thought that was a good term. Now you mention their interaction and connection. Let’s just jump right into learning about those interactions.

Sasson: The trilogy that we talked about is made up of cases with which everybody who is listening is probably familiar. Those are the Heller decision, the McDonald decision, and now, most recently, the Bruen case. [Editor’s note: Text of the cases mentioned are provided at https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/perspectives-on-supreme-court-cases/court-decisions .]

Rewinding all the way back to 2008 and the Heller decision, Dick Heller was a guy who lives in Washington, D.C., a place where a lot of us probably wouldn’t want to live. He was a special police officer there at the time. He figured, “Well, I carry a gun at work, why can’t I have one at home?” He and some other folks filed a lawsuit raising the issue of whether the District of Columbia’s prohibition on possession of firearms, even in the home, was constitutional under the Second Amendment.

The bigger question, however, was whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right of people like you and me or does it protect a collective right, the right of the militia, the rights of the states, since the Second Amendment talks about a well-regulated militia.

The main holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. That’s huge. If the court had held differently, and said the right was collective and for the militia, then essentially that would have been a collective right of the state and not an individual right. That would have opened the door to nonstop gun control and eventual abolition of gun rights as we know them.

That the Second Amendment protects an individual, not collective, right was Heller’s main holding.

The Second Amendment, however, actually protects two rights. The right to keep arms and the right to bear arms. They’re different. That’s the good news. Here is the perhaps not-so-good news from Heller: The Court said that its “opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” That’s negative because the sensitive places can be a big deal. The good news, though, is that the court made another comment that opens the door to litigate these.

The Court relied on a case from many years ago that challenged the National Firearms Act. In it a guy got arrested with a sawed-off shotgun. That case essentially held that the NFA prohibitions on short-barreled shotguns and machine guns are constitutional. The case is United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) and it is decades old, almost a century old.

There are two problems with that holding. One: it was many years before Heller and the courts weren’t looking at the possession of firearms in general as an individual right. Second, and perhaps more importantly: the court in that opinion said that the reason for its ruling was the absence of evidence tending to show that possession of a short-barreled shotgun was not consistent with the history and traditions. That was the support for the Miller court’s opinion way back then.

If I argued this case today, my argument would be that even though this case held that short-barreled shotguns could be prohibited by the NFA, that’s no longer true because, one, Heller recognized that this is an individual constitutional right, not a collective right, and two, the court in the sawed-off shotgun case, which held that the NFA was constitutional, did so because there was an absence of evidence, not because the evidence supports the holding.

The next case in our trilogy was McDonald, which was factually indistinguishable from Heller, from a perspective of the relevant facts of the case. McDonald, unlike Heller, was not a police officer and didn’t live in D.C., but he lived in Chicago and, like Heller, McDonald was a law-abiding citizen. Chicago, like DC, had an ordinance that prohibited the possession of firearms without a permit, even in residences. Like DC, through the use of bureaucratic “red tape,” Chicago made it effectively impossible to get a permit. From that legal perspective, Heller and McDonald are indistinguishable.

You might ask why did McDonald need to sue? If the Second Amendment protects an individual right in DC, surely it also does so in Chicago. It should, but prior to 1865 when the Civil War ended and before the Reconstruction Amendments – the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution – were passed, the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, applied only to the federal government. States were free to violate it with impunity. The 14th Amendment, passed in 1865, was incorporated by the Bill of Rights, and made applicable to the states. Prior to that, the FBI would need a search warrant to search your home, but the Chicago police would not. Before 1865, a warrantless search by the Chicago police was not unconstitutional. That’s the issue.

If Heller had lived anywhere but a federal enclave, we wouldn’t need McDonald to fill in the gap.

Interestingly, the Reconstruction Amendments were needed right after the Civil War because Southern Democrats were passing Jim Crow laws and many of those laws disarmed black people. To try to assure that the laws and the Constitution applied to everybody, one of the provisions of the 14th Amendment is that blacks get the same rights as everybody else.

I found it kind of ironic that Otis McDonald, a Black man, lived in the South as a child, but after military service, moved to the North, to Chicago, perhaps still trying to get away from the Jim Crow laws. I’d like to share a short clip of Otis McDonald, telling his story.

eJournal: I can’t imagine anybody more in need of guns for self defense than that gentleman. What happened?

Sasson: First, some background: after the 14th Amendment was enacted, there was not a wholesale incorporation and application of the Bill of Rights to the states. Incorporation was piecemeal. There were cases addressing the First, Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments, and so on. Thus, we needed McDonald, the case addressing the Second Amendment, to be litigated in the courts and especially in the Supreme Court.

We needed a nationwide rule saying that yes, the Second Amendment applies to the states just like the First Amendment applies to the states, just like the Fourth, and Fifth. In McDonald, the holding was that, yes, the Second Amendment applies to Chicago, Illinois, and every other state, including Hawaii, where we’re just recently having some litigation on the Second Amendment. Hawaii thinks that their opinion carries more weight than the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion, but that’s another case.

eJournal: It is. Considering how this evolved, I must ask, while the McDonald holding solved some issues, did it also leave open some doors for continued restrictions?

Sasson: Yes, it did. All that Heller and McDonald addressed is whether, under the Second Amendment, a person may lawfully possess a firearm in their home. Neither said anything about carrying firearms in public. Remember, a few minutes ago we talked about the Second Amendment protecting two rights. One, the right to keep arms, and two, the right to bear arms.

Heller and McDonald addressed the right to keep arms. Now, we come to Bruen, which addressed the right to bear arms.

Before we dive headlong into Bruen, remember that back in the day, most states did not allow open carry or unlicensed carry.

In modern history, a person had to have a license issued by the government – the proverbial permission slip – in order to carry a firearm in public. Two types of licenses have evolved over time.

One is what we call “Shall-Issue,” and one is what we call “May-Issue.” Shall-Issue is pretty much what it says. If a person’s not a criminal, felon, or prohibited by law, the government must issue the license after the person jumps through the hoops of applying and paying the fee. Sometimes there’s a shooting test or a test of knowledge of state laws, but once a person satisfies all the objective criteria, in a Shall-Issue state, the government has no choice but to issue the license.

In a May-Issue state, all the same criteria must be met as in Shall-Issue states, plus an additional criterion: some government bureaucrat must conclude that the applicant has shown, “Good-Cause” or some analogous language. Illinois, California, New York, and Hawaii were May-Issue states. An applicant had to show good cause. Well, that’s where New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruen came in.

Bruen said the 14th Amendment applied the Second Amendment to the states in the context of carrying firearms, just like it did in McDonald in the context of owning or possessing firearms. Not just one portion of the Second Amendment, but the whole Second Amendment is incorporated and applies to the states.

Now, a question that is just beginning to be litigated, is whether a state has to allow all kinds of public carry, or if they just have to allow one kind of public carry.

eJournal: And what kind would that be?

Sasson: Well, that’s the state’s choice. So far – and this may change over time with more litigation – the cases essentially say that, on the most restrictive level, if the state issues a license and allows licensed carry after going through the Shall-Issue process, then it doesn’t have to allow open carry, for example, or it doesn’t have to allow what what’s called constitutional carry or usually more accurately, permitless carry. Constitutional carry and permitless carry mean different things even though people use the terms interchangeably.

The bottom line from the Bruen perspective is that if the state says, for example, we’re going to allow permitted carry, then we can outlaw open carry, permitless carry, and the like. Of course, states can go beyond that and allow all kinds of carry, but we’re talking about the less than cooperative states here.

eJournal: Returning to that open door for restrictions previous cases didn’t completely close, the big fallout of Bruen has been the sensitive places. How is that even passing muster?

Sasson: That’s the proverbial exception swallowing the rule. That’s the litigation we’re going to be facing. Bruen also set out a test to determine how lower courts can determine whether a challenged regulation is constitutional. Essentially, that test asks, does the regulation implicate a Second Amendment interest? If it does, it’s presumptively unconstitutional and the state has the burden of showing that there is a history and tradition of this type of regulation.

We have different laws that might be held unconstitutional under the Bruen test. Let’s start with federal law. The first one is prior felonies. There are now more federal felonies than there have ever been before in history; just about everything is criminalized. From a perspective of firearms rights, the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes no distinction between violent felonies and nonviolent felonies.

Now, in the wake of Heller, McDonald, and Bruen I think a very good case can be made for change. I had a client a while back, a nice man who unfortunately had a run-in with the IRS and was convicted of a felony related to filing tax returns, or more accurately, not filing them. He’s now a prohibited person, but there was no violence involved. He has been an upstanding citizen the rest of his life. He works, pays his taxes, the whole nine yards. He slipped one time. It was nonviolent, and that took away his Second Amendment rights.

There’re a lot of people in his position that made a nonviolent mistake that doomed their Second Amendment rights for life. I’ll take it a bit further. This is not the law, just my personal opinion, but a lot of us think if you get in trouble with the law, and you do your time, it should be done. You should be back to being a citizen. Why should someone who has a criminal conviction be stigmatized for life? Have they not paid their debts to society?

Back to our topic, there’s no reason that makes any sense for prohibiting non-violent felons from possessing guns.

Another area where we see all kinds of mischief is on mental health issues. For example, veterans who seek help from the VA after coming back from a war zone may have trouble sleeping and take medicine for a little while, get reported to the federal government and they can’t pass a 4473 check anymore.

We want to keep firearms out of the possession of people that actually have mental issues, but we especially don’t want to stigmatize somebody who’s served their country and had a little PTSD and now they’re fine. That needs some tweaking and some refinement.

In my practice, I see people all the time who have a temporary mental problem. Commonly, the police take them into custody, put them in what’s typically a 72-hour hold to be evaluated, and then they’re released. They are fine; there is no problem. They have not been committed by a judge; there was no involuntary commitment. The initial 72 hours was involuntary, but the law says that a 72-hour evaluation period is not considered an involuntary commitment. They shouldn’t lose their rights over that, however, they’re being reported to the FBI. They are effectively losing their rights when they shouldn’t lose their rights.

eJournal: No wonder people don’t seek help when they begin to manifest those problems, because who would want that hung on them?

Sasson: On a national scale, the stigma of mental health problems is quite onerous.

Another problem is reporting dispositions of criminal cases by the states. Let’s say someone’s arrested and charged with a particular crime. Either they plead it down to a conviction that would not make them a prohibited person, even though the original arrest and charge was for an offense that would make them a prohibited person if convicted. We see the arrest reported, but the disposition never gets reported to the FBI. They’re considered prohibited persons until people like me go in and straighten things out. Even though court clerks are required by law to submit the dispositions, there’s a breakdown in the system and it doesn’t always happen.

eJournal: If you litigate, are you suing the state to report that outcome?

Sasson: Well, see, here’s the problem. State laws typically require reporting – Texas does – and that’s reporting of not just arrests, but also of convictions. If you plead it down, that’s supposed to be reported, too. But there’s a disconnect. I’ve got a case right now where my client, and his now ex-wife agreed to a mutual restraining order in a divorce in another state. The restraining order wasn’t because anything bad happened; it was just a mutual agreement in the process of their divorce. Because the divorce occurred somewhere outside of Texas, my client went back into court through his out-of-state lawyer and got that restraining order rescinded, but now it is still showing up when he goes to buy a gun. The reporting agency, in this case not the court, but the police department where the order was recorded and put into the federal database, has just not done anything to pull it out of the database. It has not yet been corrected on his federal record. We see all kinds of little problems like this.

eJournal: In addition, criminal convictions related to domestic violence have caused problems for years, and that got worse after the Lautenberg Amendment was applied retroactively to misdemeanor DV sentences. We need honest consideration of the prohibitions that society and the courts deem appropriate or inappropriate. What’s the current situation?

Sasson: Domestic violence litigation is a hornet’s nest, including that in the Supreme Court. Most recently, there was a case called U.S. v Rahimi. Essentially, he got arrested for having a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order. Rahimi challenged that on Second Amendment grounds, but the court said, sorry, if you have a domestic violence restraining order, you can’t have guns. The dissent in Rahimi pointed out that the majority’s holding is not historically consistent. To get to their decision in Rahimi, the Supreme Court had to violate its own rule that it set down in Bruen.

Yes, in the Rahimi case, the TRO, the restraining order prohibition, certainly implicates the Second Amendment. That’s the first prong of the Bruen test, but the test’s second prong – having a historical precedent for the restriction – wasn’t there. The majority in Rahimi danced around that and the dissent called them out on it.

Rahimi is a very good example of how bad facts make bad law, because the judges just didn’t want to go down in history as voting to allow people with domestic violence restraining orders to have guns. That’s just is bad press, and so that’s how Rahimi came about.

On a different, probably more pernicious note, there was a case back from 2009 called U.S. v Hayes, and, I think, nothing to do with you or Marty, right?

eJournal: [laughing] Not me.

Sasson: Hayes is a very interesting case, and it’s one that I think was wrongly decided and ripe for reconsideration. In 1994, a guy by the name of Randy Hayes was convicted in West Virginia of a misdemeanor crime of battery. The West Virginia battery statute is what we call a generic battery statute: it doesn’t require proof of the existence of a domestic relationship with the victim for the state to obtain a conviction. It’s just a battery, so committing a battery under this statute in West Virginia was no different whether you hit your wife or whether you hit the guy across the street during an argument. It’s just a generic battery case. We see this all the time: people are charged with offenses that would be a domestic violence offense if they’re convicted but then they plea-bargain it down to something that would not be a domestic violence offense and plead guilty to that, although that wasn’t true in Hayes’ case.

Fast forward in Randy Hayes’ case. He was convicted in 1994. Two years later in 1996, the Gun Control Act was amended to insert domestic violence convictions in addition to felony convictions. To any felony conviction, they added any misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. The term “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” is a term of art that only lawyers can twist to mean what they say it means.

To recap, in 1994, Hayes gets convicted of misdemeanor battery. Two years later, in 1996, Congress adds people with domestic violence convictions to the list of prohibited persons.

Fast forward again to 2004 – some 10 years after his battery conviction. The police go to Hayes’ home on a 911 call of domestic violence, and during that encounter, the police said, “May we search your house?” and Mr. Hayes says, “Yes, you may.” Maybe not the first mistake he made, but that’s certainly a big mistake. Hayes consented, and lo and behold, the police find a gun. Now, these are local cops, but somehow this makes its way over to the U.S. Attorney’s office and the federal prosecutors charged him with being a prohibited person in possession of a gun. That is a ten-year federal felony, unlike the misdemeanor crime of domestic violence which would only be a one-year max sentence.

Hayes appealed his conviction all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. His issue was that the West Virginia statute just says that battery is an unlawful or offensive touching of one person by another. In the West Virginia statute, there’s no element that the victim has to be in a domestic relationship with the defendant. Therefore, Mr. Hayes says, I was not convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence; I was convicted of a misdemeanor crime of generic battery.

You know what the Supreme Court said? The U.S. Supreme Court said, not so fast; it said that any generic battery conviction will suffice as a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence as long as we can look behind the curtain at some point down the road and see whether the victim was in a domestic relationship with the defendant.

We see this all the time in my practice. People call my law firm and say, “I’m having a hard time getting my Texas license to carry (e.g., CCW) because 20 years ago, me and the Mrs. had a little spat and I had this little conviction.” It turns out that not only are they ineligible for a carry license, they’re also prohibited under federal law from possessing firearms for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t matter that they’re still married to the same spouse 20 years later and never had any other problems.

The Supreme Court dissent in Hayes said,

It cannot fairly be said here that the text of the statute “clearly warrants” the counterintuitive conclusion that a “crime of domestic violence” need not have domestic violence as an element. That leaves the majority’s argument about legislative history and statutory purpose. This is not the “rare” case in which such grounds provide “fair warning” especially given that there is nothing wrong with the conduct punished, possessing a firearm, if the prior misdemeanor is not covered by the statute. An individual should not go to jail for failing to conduct a 50-state survey or comb through obscure legislative history. Ten years in jail is too much to hinge on the will-of-the-wisp of statutory meaning pursued by the majority.

eJournal: I found the dissent interesting because it was authored by Chief Justice Roberts, who isn’t always popular with strict constitutionalists. It was interesting to read his words parsing the holding of the majority. Now, the question is where did we go after Hayes? Has there been any evolution to recover from that holding?

Sasson: Hayes was decided in 2009, so there’s an argument to revisit it and try and get it overturned, but there’s also a good argument to not overturn it. Good lawyers on both sides could make good arguments. I think that Hayes was wrongly decided, but that’s just my personal opinion. That and maybe five bucks might buy you cup of coffee.

eJournal: Was it the composition of the Supreme Court in 2009? It’s a little more conservative now, but is it enough to make any difference?

Sasson: Well, that’s hard to say because if you look at the Court just from the superficial perspective of who appointed the justices, and from that you extrapolate, what we might expect from those justices, many times you would be sorely disappointed in the outcome of certain cases. It’s hard to say where we’re going, but it’s a litigator’s wonderland. Much is ripe for litigation.

The bad news, of course is that litigation costs money, and to get anything to the Supreme Court costs a whole lot of money. Most don’t have the time, money, or inclination to do that. The landscape looks favorable, but there are still a lot of landmines on our path. As we’ve seen lately, it doesn’t matter who you are, you can be pursued almost indefinitely in the courts to get the desired outcome.

eJournal: Indeed. Moving away from domestic violence, what other reforms could we anticipate? Is there any hope maybe to reform prohibitions following nonviolent felony convictions?

Sasson: It will take legislation to get out of the nonviolent felony conviction prohibition. The Gun Control Act would have to be amended through Congress and signed by the president. Perhaps there is good news on that horizon, but someone needs to coordinate that and get the legislation introduced and get the usual lobbying that takes place on any legislation to support it.

There’ve been lot of pardons lately, and perhaps some are legitimate. Maybe the people that want to pardon all these folks, would like to nip this whole thing in the bud and change the law so folks are not convicted in the first place. A place to start would be to exempt non-felons from the current law. That has got to start in Congress and ultimately go to the president.

Another reform that could be done quite easily if someone in the right place had the interest in pursuing it, is to reel the FBI back in and get them to do what they’re supposed to do – to treat Americans fairly and report things accurately and keep the records properly.

When we contact them about this stuff, the FBI always says, “We’re just a repository of data. If the data is not right, you need to go back to the source and get it corrected and have them send something to us, showing us that what we have is in error, incomplete or whatever.”

There’s another problem that we see all the time. Someone’s arrested for a crime that, were they convicted of it, would make them a prohibited person. For whatever reason, though, they are not convicted of that crime. Either it’s a complete acquittal, a dismissal, or they plea bargain it down to a non-gun prohibiting crime. Fast forward, 20, 30, 40 or more years, and they try to buy a gun. They go to a gun store and do the 4473 and check the “no” responses but their NICS check comes back denied. We look into it and a lot of times we find that the court never reported a disposition, just as we talked about.

There’s the twist in this one. The FBI says, “We’re just reporting what’s been reported to us and if that’s not accurate or complete, that’s not our fault.” We go back to the court that handled the case initially, some 20 or more years ago, and ask to have the disposition reported to their State Department of Justice and then ultimately to the FBI, and the court clerk says, “We’d be glad to do that for you, Counselor, except we destroyed the records 10 years ago. We have nothing to report.”

From my perspective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the state government or the federal government. Because government destroyed the records, this person is banned for life from possessing firearms because of an arrest that did not result in a prohibited person outcome. Because the government destroyed the records, now this person is prohibited. Whether through legislation or litigation, that should change. Put the burden on the government to prove a person is a prohibited person, if they want to deprive them of their constitutional rights.

The point is not that no one can prove anything. The point is that the government can’t carry its burden. The individual shouldn’t have any burden at all to prove that they’re not prohibited. It’s the government that should have to prove that the person is prohibited, and if the government can’t prove that, then the person automatically should not be prohibited.

Even if you buy the FBI’s argument, “We’re just a repository of documents,” it should go back to the state, and the state should have to be able to provide documents that show the person is prohibited. The rule should be that unless the government proves it, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the state government or the federal government. Unless the government proves that a person is prohibited, that person’s constitutional rights should not be infringed.

eJournal: You also mentioned ATF reforms when we were planning this article. Are you at all optimistic about reforms to that agency?

Sasson: Today, the most important case that affects the ATF has nothing to do with firearms; it affects fishermen. I’m talking about Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case that overturned another Supreme Court case, the Chevron case.

Chevron said that when a regulation that’s promulgated by an executive branch agency is challenged by a citizen, unless it’s so far out in the left field that nobody’s going to believe it, the agency is entitled to deference and the regulation is valid. That became known as “Chevron deference.” The holding in Loper Bright overturned Chevron and effectively says when a person challenges an agency action, the citizen is on equal footing with the agency. Nobody gets a presumption of constitutionality or lawfulness. Prove your case and let the chips fall where they may.

eJournal: This is a personal hot button for me. Plaintiffs don’t go to the court to ask what the agency thinks, but to ask what the court thinks.

Sasson: Exactly. This leads into a bigger can of worms. Yes, we might get a lot of ATF regulations fixed, rescinded, or not enacted in the first place, because now the ATF has to be more careful about what it does, but that’s not going to fix the bigger problem.

The bigger problem is well beyond the scope of firearms. The bigger problem is agencies making and adjudicating laws through their administrative procedures. That whole idea is unconstitutional. It is unconstitutional not because the Supreme Court has said so, but because the text of the constitution says so.

Administrative agencies are not just making law, they’re acting as a judiciary as well. An executive agency – pick your three-letter agency of preference – is not just enforcing the law, which is what the executive branch should be doing; they’re making law through their administrative rules in these regulations. If you come under their microscope and allegedly violate one of those rules, before you can go to your federal district court across the street and file a lawsuit, you have to go through their administrative procedures process. You have an administrative judge, who works for the executive agency whose regulation you’re challenging and who pays their salary, telling you that you’re wrong. The fox is guarding hen house, right?

You have to go through this process before you can go across the street to a real court and sue. Administrative tribunals do this all the time. Perhaps the judiciary likes it to some extent because it takes some work off their plate and they don’t have to work so hard, but from a constitutional perspective, it just doesn’t work.

eJournal: It really makes me wonder how we could get back to what the founders intended for us.

Sasson: That’s the question, but the problem is, it didn’t take us four years to get here. It’s taken us many years to get here. We have a hard row to hoe. Not to get political, but a lot of people are happy about the outcome of the recent election, but as good as that is, it’s just barely a starting point. There are lot of things that have to change on a permanent, long-term basis for this election to mean anything.

eJournal: I’m not feeling so optimistic right now.

Sasson: I often tell my clients, I’m not here to make you feel good; I’m just here to tell you the truth and to pull the curtain back on what’s going on. If more Americans understood their history and their constitution, that could do nothing but help us.

eJournal: Yes, one reason laypersons like me are so overwhelmed by unconstitutional laws is our lack of historical understanding of how all the power brought against us was concentrated in, to use your example, administrative agencies. We laypersons just know we’re getting convicted.

Sasson: The government has enormous power. I tell clients all the time, the best course of action is not to fall on your sword. It’s usually better to stay under the radar and stay legal, but don’t draw attention to yourself. Exercise your rights, but don’t draw attention to yourself. Blend in and go about your life.

eJournal: . . . and maybe not plead without knowing the implications of accepting that plea offer. It may not be in your best interest.

Sasson: Well, nothing against criminal defense lawyers in general – I don’t consider myself a criminal defense lawyer, although we do handle some criminal cases – but a lot of times, criminal defense lawyers don’t understand or fully appreciate the implications that the outcome of a criminal case can have on a person’s gun rights. A very high percentage of criminal cases in the trial courts are handled by public defenders. Those are government lawyers who are paid a government salary and they’ve got cases upon cases piled upon them and they’ve got neither the time nor the resources to give any case the attention it really deserves. That’s a topic for another day, but that’s the sad reality.

eJournal: Add to that a defendant who may not be thinking about the long-term implications or who doesn’t understand their constitutional rights. This perspective makes me so much more grateful for the work you do and that people like you exist and are out there fighting for us.

Now, I follow your blogging on your website, so in closing, I’d like you to tell us where we can learn more about you and your work.

Sasson: Thanks for asking. We are a Texas law firm, and we do most of our work in Texas, with Texas clients, but we’re pleased to announce that we’ve now expanded and have a new practice group to reach people nationwide. For our Texas clients, you can reach us at ArmedDefenseLaw.com. There, we can handle anything that arises in Texas, legally speaking.

For clients outside of Texas, our new website is FederalFirearmsLaw.com. This is where we can help people from both Texas and the other 49 states is in matters that deal only with federal law. So, if, for example, a person has trouble with passing a NICS check because of a state conviction, we’re not dealing with the state conviction itself, because that’s already settled. We’re dealing with the federal law, relating to how that conviction affects their federal firearms rights, with the FBI and their criminal history reports, that kind of thing. We also work with Federal firearms dealers that get audited and so forth, that’s federal law. We can now help these clients nationwide.

See https://ArmedDefenseLaw.com for Texas, https://FederalFireArmsLaw.com for everybody else. To reach us by telephone, call 972-292-7425.

eJournal: Thank you for all your work, all you do for us, and thank you for helping us understand the law’s evolution.

Sasson: Well, thank you and the Network for all that you do in bringing firearms owners together to get information and resources. What you do is very valuable to the firearms community, I believe.
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About our speaker: Menashe Sasson has been practicing law since 1999 and is the Managing Attorney of the Texas-based law firm Lapin Law Group. He is licensed to practice in the state courts of Texas and in the District of Columbia and has also been admitted to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court. 

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