The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday, May 17, in Caniglia v. Strom, unanimously rejecting the Biden administration’s claim in a Rhode Island case. The Biden administration’s claim was that police should be allowed to enter homes and seize handguns without a warrant.
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America and its affiliate, the Gun Owners Foundation, reportedly praised the Supreme Court’s latest decision. Pratt said, “The Supreme Court today crushed the hopes of gun grabbers across the country.”
He added, “Many people like Michael Bloomberg around the world would love to see the Supreme Court grant police the power to confiscate guns without a warrant. But the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects gun owners from such intrusions into their homes.” (Bloomberg is a billionaire, former New York mayor and a major funder of gun control groups.)
Two months ago, Biden and congressional Democrats began pressing for radical new restrictions on gun ownership in the Second Amendment, including the introduction of the controversial “red flag” law. The case was later brought to the Supreme Court.
The “red flag” law allows for the seizure of firearms from law-abiding gun owners with limited due process. The bill was introduced in the wake of deadly mass shootings at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and a spa in Atlanta, Georgia, in March of this year.
Police usually can’t search private property without consent or a search warrant. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that police could conduct warrantless searches related to “community caretaking functions,” but only for “vehicular accidents. The First Circuit Court of Appeals in Caniglia noted that since then, the doctrine has become “a broad duty that police officers must perform in addition to their criminal law enforcement activities.
The community caretaker doctrine holds that police officers do not always act as law enforcement officers investigating wrongdoing, but also sometimes act as janitors to prevent harm in emergency situations.
The plaintiff, Edward Caniglia, has no criminal history and no record of violence. He had been married to his wife for 22 years, and on Aug. 20, 2015, they got into an argument at their Cranston, R.I., home. He then pulled out an unloaded gun. Concerned that he might be suicidal, his wife requested a police check. After police assured him that they would not take his two handguns, the husband then went to a local hospital.
After he left, police confiscated his guns without a warrant and told his wife that her life and the lives of others could be in danger if they left the guns in the house. The police refused to return the weapons, and Caniglia filed a lawsuit arguing that the community caretaker exception should not apply to “the home – the most protected of all private spaces.
At the Supreme Court’s March 24 oral argument by telephone, Justice Department attorney Morgan Ratner supported the city of Cranston’s position that police must be free to act in potential emergency situations. He said, “The key principle is that if someone is at risk of serious harm and it’s reasonable for officers to intervene now, that’s enough.”
Writing his opinion on the case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas cited the precedent of Cady v. Dombrowski, which he said applies to police “responding to a disabled vehicle or investigating an accident.” “The question today is whether Cady’s recognition of these ‘caretaker’ duties (in the community) creates an independent argument that warrantless searches and seizures in homes are justified,” Thomas wrote, “but it does not .”
At the same time, he notes, the case involves another set of laws that the plaintiffs ignore: so-called “red flag” laws being enacted in some states. Such laws, he writes, “enable police to seize guns under court order to prevent them from being used to commit suicide or cause harm to innocent people. Although this particular decision does not address these issues, “the provisions of ‘red flag’ laws may be challenged under the Fourth Amendment, and these cases may come before us (the justices).
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