Lloyd Muldrow stopped an armed attacker in a Baltimore bar in 2022.
He is a Marine veteran and a self-defense instructor. He did the thing every one of us hopes someone will do if we are ever in that room. The Carnegie Medal — the nation's civilian award for extraordinary heroism — eventually found its way to him.
Before the medal came the arrest.
Police thanked him. Then they took him in. His offense was carrying a firearm on a Virginia permit inside Maryland, which honors permits from nowhere else. He took probation.
Read that sequence twice. The state prosecuted a man for the exact act that saved lives inside its own borders.
The case in front of the court
Maryland's Supreme Court is being asked to look at that rule again, in the case of a D.C. resident named Duvall.
A coalition filed a brief urging the court to take it up: the Second Amendment Foundation, the NRA, Maryland Shall Issue, the Second Amendment Law Center, the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Cato Institute.
Their argument is not a slogan. It is history.
Traveler's exemptions — carve-outs recognizing that a man passing through a jurisdiction is not a stranger to be re-vetted — run back to the colonial era. The brief argues the practice was widespread enough to justify reversing Duvall's conviction outright.
What is actually at stake
Let me be precise, because the loose version of this argument does the cause no favors.
Nobody in that brief claims states have no authority over firearms. Maryland can require training. It can run a background check. It can set an age.
What it cannot coherently do is treat a licensed, vetted American from a hundred miles south as a presumptive criminal because his paperwork carries a different seal.
Think about who the rule actually catches. A man in Northern Virginia who drives to Baltimore for work. A woman in D.C. who visits family on the Eastern Shore. A Pennsylvanian cutting through on I-95. Most will never know they crossed a line until the blue lights come on.
I have spent the better part of forty years in and around technology, and it taught me something that applies here: when a system's failure mode punishes its most conscientious participant hardest, the system is built wrong.
The people caught by Maryland's rule are not criminals. Criminals do not apply for permits.
The people caught are the ones who took the class, paid the fee, passed the check — and then drove north.
The answer Maryland will give
The state will argue that public safety requires it to know who is armed inside its borders. That is not a frivolous position, and Maryland is entitled to make it.
But under Bruen it has to survive a historical test, not a policy preference. On the record this brief lays out, the history runs the other way.
A right that stops at a state line is a license. Lloyd Muldrow already knows the difference.
Add your perspective
The strongest case against me is federalism: if Maryland's voters want a stricter standard than Virginia's, a national floor overrides them — put that in Left. If you think the brief is too cautious and the whole permitting regime fails under Bruen, take Right. If you think this belongs in Congress as reciprocity legislation rather than in a courtroom, that is Center.
