Civic Organizations versus the State

The Firearms Policy Coalition has won some important legal victories lately. The courts are limiting those victories to actual members of FPC and other plaintiffs, ironically because of another major legal victory.

[T]he Supreme Court’s June 2025 Trump v. CASA decision... held that so-called “universal injunctions” “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Because of this decision, the government and some courts are limiting the application of relief, sometimes only to named plaintiffs such as FPC and its members. 

Two important such victories have occurred lately: Hoffman v. Bonta held that California cannot deny FPC members and other plaintiffs the right to use non-resident carry permits. That means that if you are a resident of another state who has to travel into California, you can as an FPC member compel California to process you for a non-resident carry permit there. Meanwhile the just-decided FPC v. Bondi compels all states and the Federal government not to enforce Post Office carry restrictions against FPC members.

FPC has responded by creating a secure site for members to download an ID card identifying them as such, so they can make use of these legal victories. Membership is cheap, and funds the effort to repeal bad gun control laws through lawsuits like these. 

This points to a general principle of resisting government or corporate power through civil organizations that aim at human liberty. Just as some fight for freedom of speech, and others for freedom of the right to keep and bear arms, and others to hold the government to privacy laws or to prevent unconstitutional searches or arrests, these civic organizations have proven to be a major force historically in holding the line. Or even in expanding it: our modern 1st Amendment freedoms did not exist a hundred years ago, until they were won in courts by anarchist organizations and their lawyers, as Michael Willrich demonstrated compellingly in his history American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Whether or not one agrees with their general thrust politically, we would all be much poorer in freedoms if it hadn't been for the work of such organizations a hundred years since.

FPC does good work. We're lucky they're out there.