August 08, 2018

To Limit the Second Amendment, New York Attacks the First

Dana Mathewson

On Aug. 4, Jack Kemp posted an article detailing how New York City officials are attacking the NRA (please see the article). Now, in an article on National Review, David French declares that their efforts are unconstitutional. I sincerely hope a courts steps in and informs him of that fact!

The state has no right to threaten financial institutions that do business with the NRA.

Imagine the following scenario. Imagine the media response.

By October, the governor of Texas was fed up. A well-funded ten-month campaign by Everytown for Gun Safety designed to stigmatize gun ownership was causing support for gun rights to measurably decline. Called "You afraid?” the campaign mocked men and women who carried weapons to grocery stores or restaurants. An associated "courage” campaign asked mothers to hand back their carry licenses, and while most didn’t, the dozens who did received international media attention.

Then, two weeks before Halloween, a gunman opened fire in a Houston Walmart, and no one responded for nine agonizing minutes until police arrived. This was Texas. The store wasn’t a gun-free zone — yet not a single armed citizen was available to intervene.

The governor was furious. In public comments, he blasted Everytown, declaring — in no uncertain terms — that "gun-controllers have no place in Texas. Because that’s not who we are.” But words mean nothing without action, and the state of Texas acted. The governor directed state regulators to "urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with Everytown or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their communities who often look to them for guidance and support.”

Regulators responded, issuing "guidance letters” directed at the chief executive officers, or equivalents, of all Texas licensed financial institutions and all insurers doing business in Texas. The letters urged recipients to sever ties with Everytown and other "gun controller organizations.” The letters went well beyond a mere political exhortation and invoked the private corporations’ "risk management” obligations and their obligations to consider "reputational risks.”

State regulators began investigating Everytown’s business transactions in the state and coerced key vendors into consent decrees that not only punished allegedly unlawful activity but banned those vendors from engaging in entirely lawful business relationships with the gun-control organization. As state regulators moved, other commercial entities backed away — ending longstanding business relationships with Everytown.

Let me ask a simple question. If Texas acted like this — if it used state financial regulators to issue warning letters to institutions doing business with an organization unquestionably engaged in constitutionally protected advocacy — do you think for one moment that America’s mainstream media would remain silent, or speak up mainly to chuckle at Everytown’s financial predicament? Do you think for one moment that America’s leading progressives wouldn’t sense an immediate threat to free speech?

Yet the scenario above is playing out today, in a different state, with a different target. New York’s Andrew Cuomo is engaging in a deliberate campaign to use state power to drive the NRA out of business. It’s using a combination of consent decrees and warning letters directed at financial institutions to coerce them into cutting of business relationships with the NRA.

Cuomo’s intentions aren’t hidden. He’s on a crusade. "If I could have put the NRA out of business, I would have done it 20 years ago,” he said earlier this week. He followed up with this pithy statement: "I’m tired of hearing the politicians say, we’ll remember them in our thoughts and prayers. If the NRA goes away, I’ll remember the NRA in my thoughts and prayers.”

Clever. But when statements like this are accompanied by state action, there’s another word that applies — unconstitutional.

[...]

Heckle all you want, Governor Cuomo. Display your malice. But the instant that malice translates into state action aimed at speech is the instant the Constitution holds you to account.
My money is on the NRA here -- literally, as I am a few months into a 3-year membership. But their pockets are not really all that deep, even though they are now up to unprecedentedly high membership numbers. New York City's left is also very well-funded.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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