Firearms Act 2028

The Firearms Act 2028 is the first statute of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of America to regulate the ownership of firearms. It requires every person in the Realm who owns a firearm to hold a licence, renewed every year after an inspection of the owner’s storage; it requires every dealer to record every sale of a firearm or of ammunition and to check every buyer against a federal Index of Adjudications; it makes trafficking firearms across a polity line a federal offence; and it gives the administration of the licence to the forty-nine polities, under a federal standard, with federal money. It exempts the forces of the Crown and the police on duty, and nobody else. It came into force on 1 November 2028.

Until it passed, the federation had legislated almost nothing about firearms in two and a half centuries. The Realm has no constitutional right to bear arms: the Charter of Union is silent, its militia clause concerns the forces a polity may keep, and neither Article IX nor the Rights Act has ever been held to include one. What it had instead was a deep customary right, defended as the practice of the frontier, and forty-nine legislatures, each making its own firearms law, so that every campaign for a federal statute became forty-nine campaigns and every one of them failed.

It passed because of Chicago. On Saturday 18 March 2028, the day of the Saint Patrick’s parade, a man firing from an upper floor of an office building on the parade route killed twenty-six people and wounded more than eighty in eleven minutes, before police officers reached the room and shot him. A federal judge’s inquiry found in May that a Chicago dealer had sold him four weapons in nine days, kept no record, asked him nothing, and broken no law of Illinois or of the Realm. The ministry of Ana Valdez introduced the bill in June, the Commons passed it in July by 391 votes to 44, the Lords passed it in the week the ministry fell, and it received Royal Assent on 31 July 2028, about four and a half months after the parade, in the reign of Ernest V.

The Register does not name the dead of 18 March, the man who killed them, or the dealer who sold him the weapons. The dead are counted. This is a rule the Register has applied to the Chicago shooting from the first, and it is stated here once so that it need not be explained again.

The Register’s assessment is that the Act is the largest single step the federation has taken into a matter the polities had always held, and that it rests on two foundations, neither of them yet proved. Its legal foundation is a judgment of four Justices to three. Its practical foundation is about forty million inspections a year.

The Act

What it requires

Every owner must hold a licence, and must renew it every year. A person of eighteen or over may apply to the licensing authority of the polity in which he lives. The authority checks the applicant against the Index of Adjudications, refuses a licence to anyone listed in it or convicted of an offence listed in the Act, and grants the licence for one year. Before each renewal an officer of the authority inspects the place where the owner keeps his firearms, which must be locked, with ammunition kept separately and locked as well. The fee is capped by the Act at A£35 a year.

Every dealer must record every sale. A dealer may sell a firearm or ammunition only to a person who shows a licence, or a receipt for an application while the year of grace runs, and only after checking the buyer against the Index. Every sale is recorded, with the buyer’s name and licence, the weapon and its serial number or the ammunition and its quantity, and the record is kept for twenty years and open to inspection. A transfer between two private persons must be made through a dealer, who records it.

Crossing a polity line to arm a person who could not lawfully buy is a federal crime. Carrying firearms from one polity to another for transfer to an unlicensed person is punishable by up to ten years.

What it does not require

It does not create a federal list of owners. The polities keep their own licence records, each for its own licensees, and the Act forbids any federal authority to compile a list of licence holders from them. The only federal record it creates is the Index of Adjudications, which lists people who may not be licensed, not people who are.

It prohibits no weapon. The Act regulates who may own a firearm and how it must be kept, and says nothing about what kind of firearm it may be. A licensed owner may own what the law of his polity allows.

It does not touch the customary right as a right. It licenses it. The Act’s sponsors insisted on the distinction in both Houses, and its opponents said that a right one must apply for every year is not a right, which was the argument of the four-to-three judgment and is the argument still.

The text

The Act is twenty-four sections long, in five Parts, and it is reproduced in full. Commentary follows each Part.

Part I is Mark Kelly’s bill, nearly word for word. Sections 2 and 3 are the two clauses he introduced in eleven successive sessions, and the record of section 2 is the record the Chicago dealer did not keep. Section 4 closes what the Act’s sponsors called the door beside the shop: before 2028, in most polities, a person refused at a dealer’s counter could buy the same weapon from a private seller in the car park with no check and no record.

Section 1 is the trade power. Dealing in firearms is a business carried on across the polities’ lines and from abroad, and the federation’s authority over trade among the polities had never been doubted; the dealers’ licence was the least contested section of the Act and was the one its opponents offered to accept in exchange for dropping the rest.

Section 6 is the Act. Everything else in it could have been passed under the trade power in any of the eleven sessions in which nothing was passed at all; a licence to own is what made it the largest step the federation had taken into the polities’ ground, and the section the Frontier Arms League took to the Royal American Supreme Court. Subsection (2) is the year of grace.

Section 8 is the one the polities asked for. It forbids a licensing authority to add conditions of its own, which the sponsors put in to stop the stricter polities making the federal licence harder to get than the standard. It also stops the laxer ones making it easier, which was the point the Home Secretary made in the Lords’ week, and both kinds of polity voted for it.

Section 11 is the one the public is least sure of. The annual inspection was added in the Commons’ committee, on an amendment moved from the Liberal Federal Democrat benches, after the inquiry found that the Chicago weapons had been stored for nine days in a cupboard in a rented room; it is the section that turns forty million owners into forty million appointments a year.

Part III is the other half of Kelly’s bill, and section 16(2) is the price of all of it. The CCU’s frontbench made the prohibition on a federal list of owners a condition of its support at second reading, the ministry accepted it the same afternoon, and it is the clause the Act’s opponents would most like to see broken and its supporters most often quote back to them.

Part IV is the customs power and the federation’s own ground. Section 19 brings every imported weapon under the dealers’ records from the moment it lands, and section 20 does no more than the Crown had always done by regulation in its own buildings, which is why nobody opposed it.

Section 22 is the shortest exemption in any firearms law in the Realm. The bill as introduced exempted farmers, ranchers and hunters on their own land, and the treaty nations; the Commons struck out the first in committee, on the ground that the Chicago weapons would have been exempt had the man who bought them owned a field, and the ministry struck out the second itself, on the Attorney-General’s advice that the nations’ own law could not be recognised in the Act without a negotiation with them for which the bill had no time. The treaty nations’ protest followed from the second decision, and is described below.

Section 23 is the money. The Act could not compel a polity to build a licensing office, and section 7(2) says what happens if one does not; section 23 is the reason none needed it. All forty-nine designated an authority before 1 November.

Section 24(1) extends the Act to the lands of the treaty nations. It does not extend to the Navajo Republic, which lies outside the polity count and the Act’s extent; the Republic adopted the Act’s standard by a law of its own in October.

Background

The settlement before 2028

The Realm decided long ago that firearms were the polities’ business. The Charter of Union gives the federation no power over them in terms, and its clause on militia concerns the forces a polity may keep, not the arms a subject may own. Nobody in the Realm’s constitutional history has seriously argued otherwise, and the courts have never been asked to read an individual right into the Charter, Article IX or the Rights Act, because nobody needed one: the polities protected the customary right better than any court would have. Firearms law was made in forty-nine places, ranged from the strict codes of the old eastern provinces to the near-silence of the Mountain West, and was federal only in the Crown’s own buildings and at the customs posts.

Every federal attempt failed. The pattern was set in Tucson on 8 January 2011, when the member for Tucson East, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head at a constituency meeting and six people were killed. No legislation followed. The Realm was five years into the settlement that followed May Day and had no appetite for a second emergency, and the argument about causes never settled. Giffords, who survived, founded the chartered Institute for Arms and Public Safety in 2014, which drafted model statutes on dealers’ records, adjudication reporting, storage and private sales, and never on prohibition, and saw them enacted in about a dozen polities and in nothing at all at Parliament House.

Mark Kelly introduced the same bill eleven times. Her husband, elected for Phoenix East in 2018, introduced a federal bill in each session from then on that would require dealers to keep records in a federal form and the polities to report adjudications of mental incapacity to a federal index, and did no more, because his wife’s decade had taught him that a federal bill reaching further than the paperwork reached nothing. It reached second reading once and was talked out in committee. His party would not give it time, and he left the Liberal Federal Democrats over it in 2019 and sat thereafter as the only independent in the House. Mark Kelly introduced it for the eleventh time in the session that began in 2027. It was still on the order paper, unreached, on 18 March.

Chicago

The parade was the city’s. Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s parade is held on the Saturday nearest the feast, along the lakefront park east of the Loop, on the morning the city dyes its river green, and that year it drew, by the police estimate, about four hundred thousand people. At about a quarter past twelve, as the bands of the building trades were passing, a man began firing from an eleventh-floor window of an office building on the route, closed for the holiday, into the crowd below.

The shooting lasted eleven minutes. Police officers reached the eleventh floor through a stairwell, forced the door of the room, and shot him dead. In those eleven minutes he killed twenty-six people and wounded more than eighty. The city’s hospitals received the wounded within the hour, under the mass-casualty plan the city had rehearsed every year since May Day, and the Register’s account of the plan’s performance is that it worked, and that this was the only thing about the day that did.

Because he was killed there was no trial, and the facts of the day were established not by a court but by the inquiry. The Register has said why it names nobody. The man was thirty-four, lived alone in a rented room in a suburb west of the city, and had no record of conviction and none of any adjudication. The inquiry found no coherent political motive and declined to speculate about any other.

The King in Chicago

Ernest V came to Chicago on Tuesday 21 March. He had come to Tucson in 2011 privately, without ceremony, and nobody but the people he met had known of it for sixteen years. He came to Chicago publicly. He spent the day in the wards with the wounded and their families and the evening with the nurses and surgeons of the hospital that had received most of them, and at about nine he spoke to the Realm, on the broadcasters’ feed, from a corridor of the hospital, standing, without a desk and without a flag.

He spoke for about four minutes, and for the first time in public he spoke of Tucson. He said that he had been to Tucson seventeen years before and had told nobody, and that he had told himself afterwards that he would not have to go to such a place again. He said what he had seen in the wards that day, in plain words, and named nobody. And near the end he said that after Tucson nothing had been done, and that he did not say what ought to be done now, because that was not his to say; that it was the Realm’s to decide, and that he would be listening. The broadcast was quoted by both sides of the argument that followed for four months, each finding in it what it wanted, and the Palace never added a word to it.

The inquiry

The ministry asked a judge, and gave her six weeks. On 23 March the Home Secretary, Ruth Ahearn, appointed a judge of the Federal Court to inquire into how the weapons had been obtained, and asked for a report by the first week of May; the judge reported on Thursday 4 May, in a hundred and twelve pages and one sentence that everybody remembers. The man had bought all four weapons from a single licensed dealer in the city in nine days, the last of them two days before the parade. The dealer had kept no record of any of the sales and had asked him nothing. “He broke no law of Illinois or of the Realm, and I have looked for one.”

The dealer closed his shop in April and left Chicago, and nothing has happened to him, lawfully, because there was nothing that could. He is not named, under the same rule as the dead.

Passage

The bill

The ministry wrote a bill that went further than anyone had proposed. Ana Valdez’s ministry, a Labour and Social Democratic ministry governing with the Liberal Federal Democrats on a Parliament elected in 2023, had been absorbed for a year by the Territory of Loreto, and its Home Secretary had spent her tenure naturalising a nation. In April the Home Office asked the Institute for Arms and Public Safety to second its drafters, who worked from the Institute’s model statutes and from Kelly’s bill, and the bill the ministry published on Tuesday 6 June took in both of Kelly’s clauses in its Parts I and III and added the one thing no federal bill had ever proposed: a licence to own.

The Attorney-General’s advice on the powers was published with it, which no ministry had done before for a bill of its own. It relied on four: the trade power, on the ground that every firearm in the Realm has moved in trade among the polities or from abroad; the customs power, for imports; the Crown’s authority over its own ground; and the power to make grants, to bring the polities along. The advice said plainly that a licence to own was the furthest any of the four had been carried and that the courts might not follow, and the ministry introduced the bill anyway.

The Commons

Second reading, on Wednesday 14 June, was carried without a division. Ruth Ahearn moved it in a speech of forty minutes that read the inquiry’s sentence twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. AfR’s spokesman opposed the licence and the inspection and said his party would support the dealers’ records, and did not divide the House, because AfR’s whips had counted their own benches and found that they could not hold them. Kelly spoke for six minutes. He said that the bill contained his and went further than he would have dared, and that he would vote for all of it.

Committee stage, on the floor of the House, took three weeks. The annual storage inspection was added from the Liberal Federal Democrat benches. The farmers’ exemption was struck out on a free vote, the treaty nations’ exemption withdrawn by the ministry, and the prohibition on a federal list of owners written in at the CCU’s request. Every amendment to weaken the licence was defeated, the closest by forty votes.

Third reading was on Tuesday 18 July and the House divided 391 to 44. Every party in the House voted for it, AfR included, fourteen of whose members went into the Aye lobby against their whip; the noes were AfR’s and two independents of the frontier. The Speaker, Margaret Considine, read the result. What was said after that is told at the end of this article.

The Lords, and the fall of the ministry

The bill went to the Lords on 19 July, and a week later the ministry fell. On 26 July the Commons defeated the Valdez ministry on confidence by 229 votes to 230, on the Territory, and Valdez asked the Governor-General for a dissolution. A bill not passed before the dissolution would have died with the Parliament. The Lords sat late on the 26th and the 27th, took every remaining stage on Thursday 27 July, and passed it without amendment and without a division, the leader of the crossbench peers saying only that the House would not be the place where it died.

Assent

The Act received Royal Assent on Monday 31 July 2028, in the ordinary way, as one of the last Acts of the Parliament of 2023 and one of the last of the reign of Ernest V to which assent was given before Kittyhawk was lost on 25 September. The King made no comment on it. The general election of 7 September was fought on the Territory and not on the Act, which AfR mentioned less as the campaign went on, and on 10 September the five parties of Caleb Whitlock’s ministry agreed in their Heads of Agreement to bring it into force on 1 November unchanged. Ana Valdez, whose ministry had passed it, became Whitlock’s Home Secretary on 12 September and has implemented it since.

The powers

The Act stands on four powers at once, and on the first more than the others. The trade power carries the dealers, the records and, by the majority’s reasoning in the Supreme Court, the licence itself, on the ground that a firearm that has moved in trade among the polities may be regulated for as long as it exists. The customs power carries section 19 and nothing else. The Crown’s authority over its own ground carries section 20. The grants power carries section 23, and through it the polities’ compliance, which the Act could not otherwise have compelled; the sum paid in the first year was about A£1.4 billion, which the polities called too little and the Treasury called generous.

Nothing in the Act rests on a power over firearms as such, because the Charter gives the federation none, and the drafters were careful that no section should look as if it did. That care is visible in the text: the Act never says that a firearm is regulated because it is dangerous, and says throughout that it is regulated because it is sold, carried, imported or kept.

The customary right

The Act’s opponents did not argue that it broke a law. They argued that it broke a custom. The Realm’s firearms tradition was never written into its Charter because the frontier did not think it needed writing: a settler on the Plains or in the mountains kept a rifle as he kept a horse, the Crown’s officers were days away, and the polities that grew out of those settlements wrote the practice into their own law as a thing already true. The customary right is older than most of the polities that protect it, and its defenders that summer described it in those terms, as a liberty the Realm had always assumed rather than one it had ever granted.

The Act’s answer was that a custom can be regulated without being abolished. Its sponsors never denied the right and never proposed to take a lawful firearm from a lawful owner. What they proposed was that the owner should be known to the polity, checked against the Index, and seen to keep the weapon safely, every year, and they argued that a custom which could not survive that was a custom that had already ended. The Act’s opponents answered that a right one must apply for every year, and may be refused, is a permission, and that the Realm had just exchanged a liberty for a licence in four and a half months on the strength of one man’s crime.

Neither side has had the better of it, and the Register does not settle it. What can be said is that the argument moved, in the summer of 2028, from the question whether the federation should act to the question how far it should go, and that it has not moved back. The March of Arizona’s Crown Frontier Party, which had distrusted Kelly over firearms for a decade, voted in the March’s Diet against the Act in principle and for the money to administer it, and its leader said afterwards that the frontier had lost the argument in Chicago and would win it again in the licensing offices, if it was going to win it anywhere.

The licence

About forty million people in the Realm own a firearm, about one in nine, and between them they own about 150 million firearms. Ownership is highest in the Mountain West, the March and the northern plains and lowest in the eastern cities, and the Act’s arithmetic is that every one of those forty million owners now needs a licence, and an inspection, every year.

The inspection is the Act’s great practical question. An annual inspection of forty million homes is about a hundred and ten thousand inspections every day of the year, and the licensing authorities’ plans, published in October, assume a mixture of inspections in the home, inspections at licensing offices for owners who bring their locked cabinets to them, and, for owners renewing without change, a certificate from a licensed locksmith. The Home Office accepts the third method as satisfying section 11. The Act’s opponents say that the first year will show that the inspection cannot be done, and its supporters that the first year will show that it can.

Nobody yet knows how to inspect the Alaskan Bush. In the roadless interior of the Kingdom of Alaska, Alaska’s own law requires a person leaving the dwelling for the country to be armed, and the Act requires that person to be licensed and inspected every year. Alaska designated its authority on time and under protest, and nobody, in Juneau or at Parliament House, has said how an officer is to reach a cabin two hundred miles from a road once a year; the year of grace is being used to argue about it.

The polities

All forty-nine complied. Every polity designated a licensing authority before 1 November, some in the departments that already licensed hunters, some in new offices, and several under protest recorded in their legislatures’ journals. The Mountain West’s polities protested in terms, and the March of Arizona’s Diet resolved by a majority that the Act was a federal intrusion into a frontier practice and then voted the money for its office the same afternoon. Section 7(2), which would have put the Home Office into a polity’s licensing, has not been used.

The treaty nations protested, and have not been answered. The bill as introduced exempted them, and the exemption was withdrawn on the Attorney-General’s advice, so that a citizen of a treaty nation on the nation’s own land now needs a licence from the polity in whose borders the land lies, and an inspection by that polity’s officer. The National Council of Treaty Nations, at Denver, protested in August that the Act breaks the treaties’ guarantee of self-government, and that putting a polity’s licensing officers on nation land changes the nations’ recognised jurisdiction without their consent, which the consent requirement of the Treaty Relations Act 1978 forbids; its president, Ruth Ahtone, asked that the nations’ own licensing be recognised as satisfying the Act. The ministry’s answer is that section 24 extends the Act to nation land in words, as the courts require, and that a general licensing law changes nobody’s jurisdiction, and it has not been tested. The ministry promised to negotiate. Nothing had been agreed by 1 November, and the Council points, in every statement, to the Navajo Republic, which came under the Act’s standard by its own law and on its own terms.

The challenge

The Frontier Arms League took the Act to the Royal American Supreme Court and lost by one vote. The League, a lobby of owners founded in the 1970s, filed in August, arguing that a licence to own is a licence to possess, that possession is not trade, and that the Charter’s silence left the possession of firearms to the polities. The Court heard the case in the first week of October and gave judgment on Tuesday 24 October, a week before the Act came into force, dismissing the challenge by four Justices to three.

The majority held that Parliament may license what it may regulate in trade. Every firearm in the Realm, it said, has moved in trade among the polities or from abroad, and the power to regulate that trade includes the power to require that those who receive the goods be fit to receive them and keep them safely, for as long as they keep them. The three dissenting Justices held that the majority had found no limit, and that a power to license the possession of anything that had once crossed a polity line was a power to license the possession of almost everything. Every opponent of the Act now quotes the dissent, and the Act’s supporters say that the dissent’s question is a fair one and that the answer to it is the Charter’s, not the Act’s.

Commencement

The Act came into force on Wednesday 1 November 2028, all of it at once, and nine days in it has worked. The licensing authorities’ application systems opened at midnight in every polity, and the Home Office’s figures for the first week show about two million applications, most of them made online, the first receipts issued within minutes, and the first storage inspections made in Chicago and in Boston on 3 November. Dealers’ sales in October, which the Act’s supporters had expected to rise in a rush before the records began, were flat, and the trade’s own explanation is that owners fear the licence and not the record.

No order was needed to bring it into force, because section 24 fixed the date in the Act itself, and in the autumn of the regencies that was a mercy. Between Kittyhawk on 25 September and the accession of George V on 31 October the Realm’s Crown was exercised by a Regent, and a commencement order would have been one more instrument for a Regency to sign; the drafters had chosen a fixed date in June, for reasons of administration, and nobody had imagined in June what it would spare the Crown in October.

The year of grace

An owner has until 1 November 2029. A person who owned a firearm on 31 October 2028 commits no offence by keeping it unlicensed for a year, or for as long afterwards as an application made within the year remains undetermined, and the licensing authorities have asked owners to apply early, in the order of their birthdays, so that the inspections can be spread across the year. A person who wishes to buy a firearm or ammunition in the meantime may do so on the receipt for an application, after the dealer’s check against the Index, so that the trade did not stop on 1 November; it slowed, as every dealer in the Realm learned to read a receipt.

The first refusals have been made. The Home Office does not publish the reasons for individual refusals, and the licensing authorities’ first figures show refusals in about one application in two hundred, nearly all of them for listing in the Index. The first appeals to the polities’ courts were lodged in the first week.

The politics have gone quiet. Alternative for the Realm, which voted against the Act at third reading and opposed it through the summer, dropped it from its campaign before the general election and has not raised it since, and its own polling, which leaked in October, found the Act popular. About two-thirds of the Realm supports it in the published polls, and barely half supports the annual inspection; support is highest in the great cities and lowest in the Mountain West and the March. The families of the Chicago dead took no part in the campaign for the Act at any stage, and have asked to be left alone, and have been.

Assessment

The Act did in four and a half months what the Realm’s federal politics had refused to do in two and a half centuries, and it did it in the only way the Realm’s constitution allowed: through trade, customs, the Crown’s own ground and money, with the polities as its officers. It is a narrow Act in the form of its powers and a broad one in its effect, and the Realm’s constitutional writers are divided on whether the narrowness of the form or the breadth of the effect will be what is remembered.

Its weakness is the one its supporters chose. The annual storage inspection was added in committee as the answer to a cupboard in a rented room, and it is the section the public is least sure of and the one that will decide, in the first year, whether the Act can be administered at all. Its strength is section 16(2), which forbids the federal list of owners that the Act’s opponents feared most, and which has made the Act’s opponents argue against what it does rather than against what they feared it would do.

The ayes have it

On Tuesday 18 July 2028 the Commons divided on the third reading, and when the tellers had brought the numbers to the table the Speaker, Margaret Considine, read them to the House. She and Mark Kelly had not got on for ten years. She had protected him in the chamber when he named the largest water allocations in the Realm by their holders, and protected him reluctantly, and let the reluctance show, and she had called his firearms bill on eleven occasions and watched it fail on each of them.

The Ayes to the right, she read, three hundred and ninety-one; the Noes to the left, forty-four. The ayes have it, the ayes have it.

“At last,” said Kelly, from the cross benches, not loudly, against the custom of the House, which allows nothing to be said between the result and the next business.

Considine looked at him, and let it stand, and called the next business.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Mark Kelly, whose bill is Parts I and III
• Gabrielle Giffords, founder of the Institute whose drafters wrote the bill
• Ana Valdez, whose ministry carried it and who now implements it
• Ernest V, who spoke from Chicago and gave assent
• The Home Office, which keeps the Index of Adjudications
• Commonwealth of Illinois, where the shooting took place
• Treaty nations, whose protest is unresolved
• Polity Instruments Act 1889, the other statute that asks the polities to do a thing in their own way

Categories

Laws · Federal statutes · Firearms · Chicago · The Valdez ministry · Home Office