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LA sheriff clashes with county lawyer over closing gun shops [View all]
LA sheriff clashes with county lawyer over closing gun shops
The Los Angeles County sheriff reversed his own decision Tuesday to order deputies to make sure gun shops were closed during the coronavirus crisis after the county's top lawyer said the shops could be open.
Los Angeles, the nation’s largest county with 10 million residents, enacted a stay-at-home order last week that required all nonessential businesses to close to slow the spread of the virus.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva had said gun stores were not essential businesses and they had been selling to the public through a “loophole” allowing them to stay open, many attracting long lines of customers.
But the county order — and an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom — does not specifically mention gun shops, prompting the Los Angeles County counsel's office to issue a statement hours later on Tuesday saying it has “opined that gun stores qualify as essential businesses.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/los-angeles-sheriff-gun-shops-223914509.html
The Los Angeles County sheriff reversed his own decision Tuesday to order deputies to make sure gun shops were closed during the coronavirus crisis after the county's top lawyer said the shops could be open.
Los Angeles, the nation’s largest county with 10 million residents, enacted a stay-at-home order last week that required all nonessential businesses to close to slow the spread of the virus.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva had said gun stores were not essential businesses and they had been selling to the public through a “loophole” allowing them to stay open, many attracting long lines of customers.
But the county order — and an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom — does not specifically mention gun shops, prompting the Los Angeles County counsel's office to issue a statement hours later on Tuesday saying it has “opined that gun stores qualify as essential businesses.”
A few issues:
-first, the Constitutional one, can all locations that directly relates to an enumerated right be ordered closed as non-essential? If such an order applies to gun sales woul it not also then potentially be possible to be applied to other rights i.e. order all churches and/ or media closed as "non-essential"?
-regardless of what the business is, why is it being left to law enforcement to decide what is or is not an essential business?
-if the county attorney has declared a business is essential, how is the sheriff free to ignore that and order a business closed anyway?
17 replies
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