The alliance between sheriffs and groups operating outside the law goes back many decades. In the post–Civil War South, sheriffs were often enforcers of white supremacy through lynchings and suppression of the Black vote. The racist, antisemitic “Christian Identity” movement that emerged during the 1950s found allies among sheriffs, who were also drawn to the notion of posse comitatus that captivated portions of the midcentury political right.
The most consequential development Pishko chronicles is the collaboration that has evolved between sheriffs and the National Rifle Association in recent years. This affinity may seem obvious, but it is actually something quite new. As law enforcement officials, sheriffs once resisted the gun rights cause. In 1986, for example, the National Sheriffs’ Association opposed the Reagan administration’s effort to roll back existing gun control measures.
In Pishko’s account, the turning point came with the passage in 1993 of the Brady Act, a federal law that required each local jurisdiction’s “chief law enforcement officer” to perform background checks on gun purchasers. In almost every state, that duty fell to the county sheriffs, who by habit and history tended to be skeptical of federal authority. Because the law’s strong bipartisan support had deterred the NRA from open opposition, the organization sought and readily found sheriffs willing to carry the Second Amendment flag into constitutional battle against the federal government. Lawsuits challenging the Brady Act were brought in the name of sheriffs in six states; the one that made it to the Supreme Court was filed by Sheriff Jay Printz of Ravalli County, Montana. Printz v. United States, decided in 1997 with a majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, held that the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to “commandeer” the states into doing its law enforcement work. That the Constitution says nothing about sheriffs did not matter. For the purposes of the Brady Act, the sheriff was the state.
The Printz decision is remembered today mainly for a concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that urged the Supreme Court to reconsider its long-held view that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to own a gun. Thomas’s suggestion, startling in its time, blossomed eleven years later into District of Columbia v. Heller, a decision that recognized that right for the first time and launched the Court on its project to raise the barriers to firearms regulation ever higher.