Fed up with their tax {dollars} being wasted by a College of Minnesota program advocating for extra restrictive gun management legal guidelines, a Minnesota pro-gun group is asking each the federal Division of Justice and the Division of Schooling to analyze.
In a latest social media submit, the Minnesota Gun House owners Caucus (MCGO) introduced that the group had despatched a letter to the DOJ and DOE asking them to analyze the College of Minnesota Regulation Faculty’s Gun Management Litigation Clinic.
The clinic is ostensibly in enterprise to supply college students with expertise on circumstances associated to so-called “gun violence,” extra appropriately known as prison violence.
“The Gun Violence Prevention Clinic will provide college students a singular experiential studying alternative to work on litigation affecting a major societal downside,” the group’s web site states. “The Clinic will litigate affirmative circumstances that may scale back accidents, deaths, and trauma brought on by gun violence, problem overreaching gun legal guidelines, and defend gun legal guidelines and laws in opposition to authorized challenges.”
MCGO says, nonetheless, that the clinic, which is led by a former litigator at extraordinarily anti-gun Everytown Regulation, is little greater than a partnership with Minnesota Lawyer Normal Keith Ellison’s workplace and is working as a political and authorized arm of the Walz/Ellison Administration’s gun management technique.
“Their actions usually are not good-faith workouts in authorized training, public service, and even authorized training,” the tweet acknowledged. “As a substitute, they’re engaged in taxpayer-funded litigation activism aimed toward dismantling certainly one of our nation’s core constitutional freedoms—the Second Modification. There isn’t a place for this at a public college.”
Within the letter, MCGO offered extra particulars in regards to the clinic’s partnership with the state’s anti-gun administration.
“This publicly supported program, established in 2023, is utilizing state, college and personal grant funding to interact in one-sided authorized advocacy in help of a broad gun management agenda that undermines the constitutional rights of Minnesota residents,” the letter acknowledged. “Regulation college students within the clinic function Particular Assistant Attorneys Normal, straight taking part in authorized efforts designed to not examine or neutrally interpret the regulation—however to actively form coverage and limit the train of Second Modification rights.”
MCGO mentioned it’s notably nervous that federal training funds, whether or not by Title IX help, federal authorized clinic grants or broader institutional funding, is perhaps subsidizing the clinic’s actions, implicating federal civil rights protections and Division of Schooling compliance obligations.
Finally, the group desires federal officers from the DOJ and DOE to analyze the clinic to find out if public funds are getting used to push an anti-gun agenda at a federally funded college.
“We respectfully request that the Division of Justice Civil Rights Division provoke a pattern-or-practice investigation into this coordinated effort by the State of Minnesota and the College of Minnesota to suppress constitutionally protected conduct and silence dissenting views,” the letter concluded. “(We additionally request) that the U.S. Division of Schooling ought to conduct a complete audit of federal funds directed to the College of Minnesota Regulation Faculty, particularly viewing whether or not such funds are supporting advocacy applications that violate constitutional norms, restrict educational freedom or compromise institutional neutrality.”
