Minnesotans firing back on gun ruling Articles / Gun Laws Date: Jul 21, 2004 - 06:47 AM Standing at a busy St. Paul intersection with a .40-caliber Ruger semiautomatic holstered on his hip, Lucky Rosenbloom said a judge's ruling last week that Minnesota's handgun law is unconstitutional hasn't hurt his business of training applicants for permits to carry firearms. "Quite the opposite," he said. "More people have been stopping and asking me about it. I'm telling them: 'Get your training in now and you can get licensed once there's a stay of the judge's order.' " Then, even if the ruling by Ramsey County District Judge John Finley is upheld in higher courts, permit holders could keep packing in public because they'd be grandfathered in, gun-rights advocates say.Rosenbloom, 47, is a living emblem of a changing Minnesota culture: a black Republican who hawks personal protection training o­n the same corner where his father, the late Tiger Jack Rosenbloom, sold candy and firewood for decades.Lucky Rosenbloom, a multifaceted entrepreneur who is also a freelance paralegal, said he is ready to help his handgun students file court papers in opposition to Finley's ruling. The cause has even more legal firepower in the person of Joe Olson, longtime Minnesota gun-rights leader and constitutional law professor.Olson was a major lobbying force behind last year's enactment of the law, which makes handgun permits available to practically any adult who gets the required training and passes a criminal and mental health background check. Then Olson and business partner Tim Grant founded the for-profit American Association of Certified Firearms Instructors Inc., which has trained 90 active instructors, including Rosenbloom, in little over a year. Those instructors, in turn, have taught about 6,500 of the more than 25,000 people who have gotten handgun permits under the 2003 law.Now Olson is marshaling arguments for an appeal of Finley's finding that the measure violated a state constitutional requirement that each law passed by the Legislature embrace but a single subject expressed in its title.Parliamentary moveAs a majority of states, prodded by lobbying from the National Rifle Association, began to liberalize their handgun laws in the 1990s, the Minnesota Legislature remained locked over the effects of such a change.Gun-rights proponents argued that an armed citizenry would deter crime; opponents said it would lead to indiscriminate gunplay in public. Little evidence of either outcome has emerged since the law's enactment in Minnesota.Finley's decision focused o­n none of that, but rather o­n the constitutional consequences of the unusual parliamentary strategy that was used finally to break the legislative logjam.By large margins, the House twice passed an NRA-backed handgun bill that failed o­n a tie vote in the Senate, then was denied another floor vote by Senate DFL leaders. House leaders responded by using as a vehicle a technical bill for the Department of Natural Resources that had been passed unanimously by the Senate.First, the House attached a minor "bridge amendment" dealing with DNR-certified rifle safety training for hunters. Then came the much bigger amendment -- 26 pages of handgun policy revisions that dwarfed the original 10-page bill. With the bridge amendment in place, the move withstood a so-called germaneness challenge o­n the floor, a parliamentary safeguard against amendments that have nothing to do with the bill being debated.All of this was strategy to force an up-or-down Senate vote o­n the measure. Under legislative rules, senators could o­nly concur with or reject the House amendments; after seven hours of debate they voted 37 to 30 to concur. Hours later, Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the bill into law.'Totally unrelated'In his ruling, Finley said the handgun language is "totally unrelated" to the original bill. He also noted that the bill's official title, "an act relating to natural resources," was not changed in any of the legislative maneuvering. The reviser of statutes later changed it to "an act relating to state government regulation" without legislative approval, Finley said."This law is unconstitutional because it clearly violates not o­nly the intent, but also the clear meaning" of the state Constitution's requirement of single-subject legislation, Finley wrote. He also said that the handgun amendment was attached and approved without legislative hearings or notice to the public. As a result, he added, the "basic Minnesota value of clean government is totally frustrated when the Legislature itself clearly violates the underpinnings of such a basic conscience-guided law and constitutional provision."And he quoted Minnesota Supreme Court opinions dating to 1858 in support of the single-subject clause as a bulwark against "fraud or surprise upon the Legislature and the public" and "direct, cynical violation of our constitution" via "garbage or Christmas tree bills."Attorney General Mike Hatch has said he will appeal the ruling, beginning with seeking a stay of its effect while the appeal is pending. No motion for a stay was filed last week. Hatch spokeswoman Leslie Sandberg said Friday that it is expected this week.In the meantime, permits issued under the law remain valid, but new o­nes would be subject to the more restrictive former law that gave sheriffs and police chiefs broad discretion to grant or deny them. A case for appealIf Hatch's lawyers need any help with the case, all they have to do is call Olson, who teaches constitutional law at Hamline University. He said that in the past 25 years the state Supreme Court has invalidated o­nly o­ne law based o­n the single-subject clause: a prevailing wage provision stuck in an education bill.All other challenges have failed because bundling of issues is an inescapable element of legislative compromise, Olson said."Amendments come out of the blue all the time," he said. "Stuff gets stuck in there that nobody thinks of. There was no o­ne in the Legislature who didn't know what that bill was or at least had the opportunity to find out."By and large, Olson said, the high court has interpreted the single-subject clause extremely broadly to limit its intrusion o­n the authority of the legislative branch. In 1989, the court pronounced that no far-reaching legislative amendment would violate the Constitution "so long as a common thread connects it to the general subject of the original bill, even though the connection is a mere filament."For Olson, the handgun law has "a logical connection" to the DNR bill's provisions o­n hunter safety and recognition of other states' certificates.According to Finley, a key rationale for the single-subject clause was to prevent legislative "log-rolling," a process of putting together enough initiatives that can't pass individually but in concert can muster a majority.With the handgun ploy, Olson said, "there was no log-rolling. The bill had support for years o­n its own. The o­nly reason for it was to let democracy work o­n the floor of the Senate."And, although the final bill wasn't heard in committee, he said, the policy was the subject of 10 House hearings and o­ne in the Senate. "It was fully debated," Olson said. "There was no hiding the ball here."http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/4880656.html This article comes from TxGuns.com http://www.txguns.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.txguns.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=79