Law School’s Allen Rostron invited to consult on Michael Bloomberg’s $50 million effort

Prof. Allen Rostron has joined a quiet front in former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $50 million effort to reduce gun violence.

Rostron is the William R. Jacques Constitutional Law Scholar at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, and a national expert on the Second Amendment. He was one of a handful of academics and other top thinkers invited to New York recently to form a tactical planning team for the former mayor’s gun control group, Everytown for Gun Safety.

Rostron said the nonprofit organization, which Bloomberg formed after the 2012 Newtown, Conn., school shooting, wants to begin developing strategies for dealing with a coming tide of legal challenges to the country’s gun control laws.

“They reached out to me and invited me and some other people to come out there to start to strategize about what their organization could do that would be helpful,” said Rostron, who, before joining UMKC in 2003, served as senior staff attorney at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

“You wouldn’t want the law to develop in a haphazard manner,” he said. “So you don’t want to wait until the last minute when there’s a case on the Supreme Court’s doorstep. Maybe you can steer a case to the Court that is the best for your side. Or at least, you’d be prepared.”

Rostron said high-profile shootings like the one in Newtown, which left 20 children and six adults dead, have raised interest in passing gun control laws. Bloomberg pledged $50 million to Everytown for Gun Safety, which he has said will take on the National Rifle Association and its powerful lobbying arm.

But it was a decades-old grassroots effort by the NRA and other groups that oppose gun control laws, that should get credit for the courts’ interest in the issue, Rostron said.

“There weren’t really any clear Supreme Court cases about the Second Amendment for two centuries,” he said.

Until relatively recently, according to Rostron, the Court interpreted the amendment giving citizens the right to keep and bear arms, as a somewhat antiquated guarantee that was largely related to states forming militias. But a quiet, steady campaign of scholarly articles supported by the NRA and other gun rights groups were published in law journals over many years. And that is what has quietly changed the amendment’s legal interpretation, Rostron said.

“It took decades of articles and articles,” he said. “But eventually they influenced the courts and led to this very dramatic rethinking of the Second Amendment.”

While the Supreme Court has ruled on some aspects of the Second Amendment in recent years, many questions still must be settled. For example, when the Court struck down a law in Washington, D.C., that banned hand guns, the court only said that banning handguns in someone’s home was unconstitutional. It didn’t say anything about whether the law could ban handguns in public places or in private businesses.

Just as civil rights and gay marriage and many other legal battles have been influenced by behind-the-scenes strategizing, Bloomberg wants those waging the battle over gun rights to think carefully about which state law to challenge first and when.

“This is a good lesson overall for any legal issue,” Rostron said. “It’s better to be a little strategic about it and not just have whatever random case happens to fall in the court’s lap.”