The mayor of Lansing, Michigan, and the city’s police chief want tougher gun control laws from the state legislature, which only recently wrapped up its business for the year, setting in motion a time clock that will allow new gun restrictions to become effective in mid-February.
According to WLNS News, Mayor Andy Schor—a Democrat first elected to the office in 2017—and Chief Ellery Sosebee want to crack down on alleged “careless” gun owners.
But a flyer illustrated in the WLNS story suggests this may actually be an effort to erode Michigan’s three-decades-old preemption statute. The flyer says both officials are asking lawmakers to “Change Michigan Law to Allow Local Governments to,” and it is followed by a wish list.
The flyer also suggests “Other Changes to Michigan Law,” such as “Allow for local control regarding guns & ammunition.”
There are calls for “increased penalties for failing to keep or secure a firearm from someone prohibited from possessing a gun” and “limiting magazine capacity to original manufacturer specifications.”
The Lansing City Pulse reported, “at a news conference they released a list of measures that could be taken to curb a rising trend of lost or stolen guns ending up in the hands of criminals.”
It’s not the first time Schor has gone after guns. In 2021, WKAR News reported how Schor had called for an ordinance requiring lost or stolen guns to be reported to the police. By then, Schor was in his second term.
The timing is interesting, as just a few days ago, the Holton Township Board of Trustees adopted a resolution declaring the community—located in Muskegon County—to be a “Second Amendment Sanctuary.” According to the Midwesterner News, this resolution contains a militia addendum that says township residents “are eligible to join the militia and may make their intentions known by acknowledging their intent on social media, explicitly telling friends or family members they wish to join or stating their intent by letter to the Township Militia.”
This is not the first time, or the first state, where local municipalities have wanted to erode state preemption statutes or outright challenge such laws.
The City of San Francisco has tried twice in the past to enact local gun restrictions, but both times, intervention by gun rights organizations—specifically the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association—thwarted the efforts.
The City of Edmonds, Washington, tried to adopt a so-called “safe storage” ordinance, only to be similarly challenged by SAF and NRA in a case known as Bass v. City of Edmonds, which went all the way to the state Supreme Court, where the state’s preemption law was unanimously upheld in 2022.
Possibly one of the best examinations of Michigan’s preemption law can be found on the website for the Giffords gun control group. The language of Michigan’s statute is easily understood:
“A local unit of government shall not impose special taxation on, enact or enforce any ordinance or regulation pertaining to, or regulate in any other manner the ownership, registration, purchase, sale, transfer, transportation, or possession of pistols, other firearms, or pneumatic guns, ammunition for pistols or other firearms, or components of pistols or other firearms, except as otherwise provided by federal law or a law of this state.”
The law was originally passed in 1990 (Act 319) and amended in 2015 (Act 29), so it is one of the earliest of the preemption laws, many of which were patterned after the statute passed in Washington, first in 1983 and strengthened in 1985.
The question that must be answered is whether eroding Michigan’s preemption law will accomplish what mayors like Schor envision. Probably not.
As Ammoland News has reported earlier, a good example would be the City of Seattle, which has gotten away with adopting a gun control “sales tax” on firearms and ammunition, adopted in the summer of 2015 and enforced starting in 2016. In the years since enactment, the number of homicides in the city has more than doubled, the tax has never come close to reaching its originally projected annual revenue ($30,000 to $500,000), and one of the city’s busiest gun retailers moved to a different city in a neighboring county. This year, Seattle is expected to set a new record for the number of murders in the city, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has called the law a “total failure.”
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About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
