“I don’t have any illusion about having the final word on this,” Chatham County Superior Court Judge Benjamin Karpf wrote shortly before dismissing lawsuit.
A Georgia judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging a Savannah ordinance penalizing gun owners for leaving firearms inside unlocked vehicles.
According to The Associated Press, the ruling was issued earlier this week by Chatham County Superior Court Judge Benjamin Karpf. In his decision, Karpf did not address any of the arguments made in the claim. Instead, he simply found that plaintiff Clarence Belt lacked standing to sue the city, as he has yet to suffer any harm as a result of the ordinance.
Belt, notes The Associated Press, is not a Savannah resident and has not, to date, been arrested or cited for any violation of the city’s new law.
Before the dismissal, John R. Monroe, an attorney for Belt, argued that the ordinance appears to violate a Georgia state law prohibiting local governments from restricting or otherwise regulating “the possession, ownership, transport, [or] carrying” of firearms.
Chris Carr, the state’s Republican attorney general, has also made similar claims.
In a recent letter to Savannah officials, Carr said that “no local ordinance can regulate firearms.” However, the city has so far ignored Carr’s recommendations, despite warnings that the attorney general’s office might file its own lawsuit in response.
“It’s just a matter of time that this ordinance is going to be struck down,” Monroe said in a statement.
Before the lawsuit’s dismissal, attorneys for the city had told the court that Savannah’s ordinance regulates vehicles—not firearms.
“We’re regulating the vehicle, not the firearm,” Savannah city attorney Bates Lovett said in a September hearing.
Lovett emphasized that it remains legal to store a firearm in a vehicle in Savannah.
“But once you leave the vehicle, you must lock that vehicle,” he said.
Monroe told The Associated Press in a phone interview that neither he nor his client have decided whether to appeal the judge’s ruling. He said that Belt, who lives about 66 miles outside of Savannah, typically keeps a firearm in his vehicle while visiting the city. If the ordinance is not repealed, or its enforcement is not blocked, Monroe believes that Belt could be cited.
“He has trouble walking and his car doesn’t have power locks,” Monroe said. “To comply with the ordinance, among other issues, he’d have to get out and walk around the car to lock it manually. That extra walking is hard on him.”
Although the ordinance is likely to face further challenges, Karpf himself has admitted that—no matter which way he might have ruled—the case will almost certainly be escalated.
“I don’t have any illusion about having the final word on this,” Karpf said in September.
Sources
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