Campaign 01: Second Amendment, prepared warning, no bill filed yet
We are prepared if you try it.
Defending the Constitution (DTC) defends constitutional rights when they are threatened, starting with the Second Amendment. Campaign 01 is a warning to Rep. Jamie Raskin: a national gun registry would violate the Second Amendment, so do not file a registry bill. If he does, we are ready, with the law, the cases, and the people, on our side.
Our goal is to hear from 500,000 gun owners on this first campaign. Signing on to DTC is an expression of interest only, not a lawsuit, not a class action, and not legal advice.
What is Defending the Constitution?
DTC is an umbrella effort to defend constitutional rights when they are threatened by government overreach, one campaign at a time, with the law and the facts laid out plainly, before a bill becomes a law.
The Second Amendment registry fight below is Campaign 01, and it is the only active campaign on this site. The other campaigns listed in the Campaigns section are planned, they are not lawsuits, they have no defendants, no cases, and no dates. They are here so supporters can see where DTC is headed, and so the next warning does not have to start from scratch.
Campaign 01: Second Amendment, the bottom line in 30 seconds
In November 2026, reporting attributed to Rep. Jamie Raskin, the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 8th District and the leading Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, a stated top priority of universal gun registration. No national registry law has been enacted, and no stand-alone registry bill by Rep. Raskin has been identified. That is the point of this site: to make clear, before a bill is filed, that a registry would face a prepared, serious legal challenge, and that hundreds of thousands of law-abiding gun owners are watching.
A registry is not a background check. A background check asks whether a particular buyer is prohibited from buying a particular gun at a particular time. A registry records who owns what guns, centrally, over time, a list of law-abiding owners and their firearms. That distinction matters, legally and practically, and this site keeps it in view throughout.
What was reported about Rep. Raskin’s intent
On November 5, 2026, the National Association for Gun Rights claimed that Rep. Raskin, as the incoming leading Democrat on House Judiciary, had promised universal gun registration would be a top Democratic priority. That claim was picked up in secondary reporting the same week. Other reporting describes the position Rep. Raskin has publicly backed as universal background checks on private gun sales.
Both descriptions are reported here because the difference matters. If the proposal is universal background checks, that is one debate. If it is universal registration, a central record of gun owners and their guns, that is a different, far more serious constitutional problem, and it is the proposal this effort is prepared to challenge.
Federal law already bars a registry
Congress has already spoken on this question. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, at 18 U.S.C. § 926(a), provides that no rule or regulation prescribed by the Attorney General may require that records required by federal firearms law be recorded at, or transferred to, a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any state or political subdivision, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.
In short: federal agencies may not build a registry by regulation. A new statute could attempt to repeal or override that bar, but that statute would then have to survive the Second Amendment itself, and that is where the Supreme Court’s cases come in.
The cases
The Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, that the right applies against the states as well as the federal government, and that restrictions must be judged by text, history, and tradition, not by a judge’s balancing of interests.
| Case | What it held |
|---|---|
| District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) | The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, unconnected with militia service, including the right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense. |
| McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) | The individual right recognized in Heller applies against state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. |
| Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016) | The Second Amendment extends to arms that did not exist at the founding; the right is not limited to the weapons of 1791. |
| New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) | When the plain text of the Second Amendment covers conduct, the government must show the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. No interest-balancing test. |
| United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024) | A firearm restriction can survive if it fits within the historical tradition, here, disarming a person found by a court to pose a credible threat. The Court confirmed Bruen’s test, while showing that history, not policy preference, decides. |
How Bruen applies to a registry
Step one: the plain text. Keeping and bearing arms is the conduct at issue, and a registry burdens it by conditioning and recording that ownership centrally.
Step two: history. The government would have to identify a historical tradition of a general, central registry of law-abiding gun owners and their firearms. No such founding-era tradition has been identified. Founding-era laws disarmed particular people for particular reasons, or required militia musters, they did not create a standing federal list of every gun owner.
Step three: the burden. A registry is not a narrow, targeted measure. It sweeps in every law-abiding owner, creates a central record that can be misused, and chills the exercise of a constitutional right. Under Bruen, that is the government’s problem to justify with history, not the citizen’s problem to justify with need.
What is prepared, and what triggers it
Drafts have already been prepared: an individual complaint, a class-action version under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, and a letter to fellow gun owners. They are unfiled drafts, and they require attorney review before any filing.
The trigger is a real step toward a registry: a filed registration bill, an enacted registration law, or an agency rule creating a registry system. Until then, this site is the warning.
Campaigns: what DTC covers
One umbrella, one sign-on list, one campaign at a time. Only Campaign 01 is active. The rest are planned, and are listed here as coming soon, not as filed cases.
| Campaign | Status | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign 01: Second Amendment | Active | Opposing a national gun registry. Prepared warning to Rep. Jamie Raskin (see the full case on this page). Goal: hear from 500,000 gun owners. |
| Campaign 02: First Amendment, Speech | Planned, coming soon | Defending freedom of speech. No case, no defendant, no date yet. |
| Campaign 03: Tenth Amendment, States’ Rights | Planned, coming soon | Defending the powers reserved to the states and the people. No case, no defendant, no date yet. |
| Campaign 04: Liberty / Fourteenth Amendment | Planned, coming soon | Defending liberty and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, grounded in the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence (1776): that all are endowed with unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that a long train of abuses may be listed as grievances. The Declaration is founding principles and moral and historical context, it is not itself enforceable law. The legal hook for this campaign is the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty and due process. No case, no defendant, no date yet. |
Signing on below signs you on to DTC generally, starting with Campaign 01. You will be contacted about this effort as new campaigns are added. You will not be signed on to a lawsuit by doing so.
Add your name, to DTC
If you want to be counted, and contacted if Rep. Raskin proceeds with a registry proposal, and as DTC adds future campaigns. Add your name below. Name and email are required; phone is optional.
What signing on does, and does not do
- It signs you on to Defending the Constitution (DTC) generally, starting with Campaign 01 (Second Amendment).
- It is an expression of interest and support only.
- It does not make you a named plaintiff.
- It does not create an attorney-client relationship.
- No class has been certified, and no lawsuit has been filed.
- It does not authorize anyone to speak for the NRA, which is not a plaintiff, sponsor, or endorser unless it authorizes that in writing.
- Your information will be used only to contact you about this effort.