Second Amendment rights
disqualifier overturned

By Dean Weingarten. January 2nd, 2018
Article Source

There has been a major win for Second Amendment supporters in Pennsylvania.

On February 16, 2016, Alton C. Franklin filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He contended that a prohibition against his ability to acquire or possess firearms because of a brief involuntary commitment in 2002, was unconstitutional. With a partial summary judgment in his favor, and a re-submission in January of 2017, Mr Franklin prevailed. The law was not struck as unconstitutional, directly. Rather, the Pennsylvania law was ruled to be insufficient to meet the Constitutional requirements of the Federal law.

From princelaw.files:

This case arises from Defendants' determination that Mr. Franklin's less-than-24-hour involuntary stay in a hospital for an involuntary emergency mental health examination pursuant to Section 302 of the Pennsylvania Mental Health Procedures Act ("Section 302 of the MHPA"), 50 Pa. Stat. and Cons. Stat. Ann. § 7302, resulted in a complete prohibition of Mr. Franklin's ability to ever legally acquire, possess, or use a firearm in his private capacity for the purposes of federal law, namely for the purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4)("Section 922(g)(4)"). Mr. Franklin challenges Defendants' position on numerous grounds - on most of which the Court will not now offer an opinion. However, the Court is persuaded that, by its own terms, Section 922(g)(4) does not restrict Mr. Franklin's ability to possess firearms based on a brief emergency mental health examination pursuant to Section 302 of the MPHA that was justified by only the ex parte decisions of a police officer, an unspecified official in the county administrator's office, and a single physician.

The actual order from justia.com follows - .......

All too often attempts are made to deprive people of their Second Amendment rights on something trivial. Here we have a case where there should not even have had to be any involvement in the courts at all - instead, the short term matter leading to the problem should never have been treated the way it was. Fortunately however due process did at least remedy the situation.

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