Convicted gun runner now in the New Hampshire state legislature seeks to join suit by Massachusetts doctor who wants the right to strap a loaded gun on whenever he goes out

A New Hampshire state legislator who can't buy a gun - because he spent more than 12 years in federal prison on gun and conspiracy charges - is asking a federal judge to let him join Kang Lu in Lu's bid to overturn gun-control laws in Massachusetts.

Jason Gerhard, who won election as a state rep last November - just two years after getting out of federal prison - is one of six people from New Hampshire and Hadley in western Massachusetts to file identical motions over the past couple of weeks asking to be added as plaintiffs in Lu's lawsuit.

Lu is seeking to have one of the nation's toughest set of gun laws overturned on Second Amendment grounds - a pursuit for which he has lost his right to practice medicine across much of the country, both because he has been arrested in Massachusetts and Quebec for unlicensed gun possession and because he kept checking "no" on medical registration forms about whether he had ever been arrested or convicted.

Lu began losing his medical licenses in one state after another, starting here, in 2020.

That's the same year that Gerhard got out of prison on his sentence for purchasing several rifles - and helping build pipe bombs and other explosives - for Edward and Elaine Brown, a couple who, rather than report for prison after their convictions on tax-evasion charges, spent nine months holed up on their New Hampshire property, vowing to take out any US marshals who tried to take them in.

Over the past couple of weeks, Gerhard and the others filed near-identical two-page motions arguing they should be allowed to join the case because they, too, want to crush the Massachusetts laws beneath their heels as they move about protecting themselves and engaging in "the common defense."

The New Hampshire petitioners do not specify whether they are busy trying to protect themselves on trips into a state many of them profess to hate or attempting to provide for the common defense in Massachusetts.

One of Gerhard's first acts as a New Hampshire state representative this year was to file legislation to let convicted felons in New Hampshire buy guns made and sold in the state - a way to get around a federal law that bars people convicted of felonies from owning guns. He told InDepthNH that, now that he's a state representative, it's unfair that he can't protect himself on the streets of the state capital, Concord, a small city about the size of Marlborough, MA that is apparently far, far rougher than ignorant Massachusetts residents might think:

It’s hard for me to understand how we can have my situation, a state representative who cannot defend himself. So, if I’m going out into the parking garage late at night and somebody yells, 'Hey sweet cheeks,' I’m just joking. There’s no way for me to defend myself. I mean I have a knife, but come on.

In a decision rejecting his request to overturn his guilty finding, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit described Gerhard's actions in the months he spent on and off the 100-acre property belonging to the tax-evading couple. In addition to buying numerous rifles, he returned there one day with 6,000 rounds of ammunition:

The next day, Gerhard bought necessary ingredients for manufacturing pipe bombs. The pipe bombs consisted of cylinders of pipe filled with explosive powder, with space for a fuse to be inserted; twenty-one pipe bombs were found on the Browns' property after they were arrested.

The decision also describes what happens when Gerhard left the couple's property and got into a car accident in Lebanon, NH, after which his car was impounded:

The next day, Gerhard went to the Lebanon Police Department to complain and encountered several deputy marshals. A “very agitated” Gerhard told the deputy marshals that they “had no right to be there” and were enforcing “unconstitutional” laws. In response to Gerhard's assertion that Edward Brown was a “patriot,” one of the marshals asked how he could consider Brown a “patriot” after the threats Brown had made against law enforcement officers and their families. Gerhard replied that the officers “were not following the Constitution” and “were now enemies of the Constitution, which was treason, and the penalty for treason was death.”

Gerhard was 21 at the time.

So far this year, his legislative record consists of introducing the two bills that would let convicted felons buy guns made in New Hampshire, a bill to let public-school students take time off for religious classes - and get credit for them - a bill that would prohibit the government from using violence against Free Staters and other people who believe in "self-governance" and a bill that demands the IRS explain how the hell it thinks it can make people pay income taxes.