Montana & Intrastate Commerce

Some people are saying that this is a "sovereignty" issue. From the April 16, 2009 Helena (Mont.) Independent Record:

Gov. Brian Schweitzer has signed into law a bill that aims to exempt Montana-made guns from federal regulation, adding firepower to a battery of legislative efforts to assert states’ rights across the nation.

“It’s a gun bill, but it’s another way of demonstrating the sovereignty of the state of Montana,” Democrat Schweitzer said.

Since the law applies only to those guns that are made and kept in Montana, its impact is limited. The state is home to just a handful of specialty gun makers, known for recreating rifles used to settle the West, and most of their customers are out-of-state.

But supporters of the new law hope it triggers a court case testing the legal basis for federal rules governing gun sales.

“What we need here is for Montana to be able to handle Montana’s business and affairs,” bill sponsor Rep. Joel Boniek, a Republican and wilderness guide from Livingston, told fellow lawmakers during the bill’s House debate.

The measure is one of many introduced by state lawmakers across the nation seeking to confront what some see as a federal overreach into state matters that will be extended with the national stimulus plan.

I would say that Montana is just asserting its authority over intrastate commerce. Of course, that's a form of sovereignty--or just following the Constitution, which grants federal authority to regulate interstate commerce--but leaves regulation of other commerce to the states.

Count on the lunatic left of the Democratic Party to raise the race card, rather than admit that the objections to the Obamination have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with overreaching federal power:

Opponents of the state sovereignty bids, however, warn they could give legitimacy to the kind of anti-government ideas that fueled the militia movement in Montana and elsewhere.

“When you really actually get in and look at it there is a lot of what we feel is very dangerous, very anti-government language that reads very similar to posters for the militia movement in the 1990s,” said Travis McAdam, the interim director of the Montana Human Rights Network, a group formed to oppose racism and extremism.

One of the few state Senators who voted against the gun bill — Sen. Christine Kaufmann, D-Helena — is that group’s director when the Legislature is not in session. She ties the bills’ proliferation to fears about the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama and stimulus spending.

“I do think that there is a kind of renewed vehemence to this kind of right-wing rhetoric being spewed by conservative talk show hosts to rile the troops and they are using the fact that we have a Democratic, black president as one of their rallying calls,” Kaufmann said.

This isn't "anti-government" but an attempt to return power to the states that has been usurped by the federal government. You can make the case that states aren't free of the same problems as the federal government when it comes to abuse of power; there's plenty of historical precedent for this. But in most of America, the state government is considerably more responsive to popular sentiment than the federal government, simply because state legislators come from districts that are measured in the thousands to tens of thousands--instead of the roughly 400,000 that each member of the U.S. House of Representatives now misrepresents.