Our guest blogger is Billy Corriher, associate director of research for Legal Progress.

Hours after the horrific shooting in Aurora, Colorado last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to Georgia’s ban on carrying concealed weapons in places of worship. Guns rights advocates, along with two Reverends, argued the ban violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but the court disagreed. When the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, Justice Scalia said the ruling should not “cast doubt on . . . laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

The 11th Circuit held that the rights of gun owners are trumped by the rights of private property owners to determine the circumstances under which others can enter their property. The Georgia law allows parishioners packing heat to ask the church for permission to bring their guns. The court said, “An individual’s right to bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment, whatever its full scope, certainly must be limited by the equally fundamental right of a private property owner to exercise exclusive dominion and control over its land.”

The ban on guns in churches was enacted in 2010, when Georgia relaxed its concealed carry laws. The former law prohibited guns in “public places,” but the state legislature replaced that rule with a list of eight places where guns are forbidden. The list includes places of worship, government buildings, bars, nuclear power facilities, and polling places. Other than these restrictions, Georgia’s gun laws are among the most permissive in America.

But even these meager restrictions are apparently too oppressive for guns rights advocates. Father Stephen Pontzer, a supporter of the lawsuit, says the blame for gun violence belongs on those pulling the trigger. “It is not the actual item that really causes the trouble it is actually the people who would misuse them,” says Pontzer.

The Georgia legislature is now considering a bill that would overturn the 11th Circuit’s decision and further relax the state’s concealed carry laws to allow guns in churches, government buildings, schools, and bars, without the consent of property owners. In a nod to conservatives’ paranoia about the federal government seizing guns, the bill would also prohibit the National Guard from confiscating weapons during emergencies.

Now that Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration has obtained access to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database — records that Florida could have received months ago had it provided the necessary information to DHS — it has officially abandoned the error-riddled original purge list. But this move comes only after local governments were forced to spend thousands purging voters from the rolls.

The Scott administration now acknowledges that the 2,600-person list it once deemed “sure-fire” non-citizen voters is “obsolete.” As ThinkProgress reported, that list contained hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens.

But beyond inconveniencing hundreds of legitimate voters, the Scott administration’s reliance on that earlier bad list came with a heavy cost to already cash-strapped local governments. A ThinkProgress survey of six county elections supervisors reveals that that 2,031 letters they sent out, at the Scott administration’s instruction, cost them at least $10,000.

Averaged out, that comes to more than $5.14 per name and projects to over $13,000 in unnecessary costs to local governments. While this number may not seem huge, it doesn’t include the costs to the state government — or the opportunity cost of wasting local employees time on processing the purge efforts, instead of on ensuring fair and efficient elections. And the number is only going to go up with the Scott administration promising more purges in the future.

Last May, Scott took an ax to the state’s budget, cutting what he deemed “short-sighted, frivolous, wasteful spending.” It appears he may have missed some.

The Supreme Court may take on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 next term, if two recent legal challenges get their way. Petitions from Kinston, North Carolina and Shelby County, Alabama reached the Court Friday, pushing for the invalidation of Section 5 of the law, which requires that states with a history of discrimination “pre-clear” any changes in election procedure with the federal government.

This provision most recently landed the state of Texas in court after the Justice Department blocked a voter ID law that would disproportionately target minorities. There have been more challenges to the Voting Rights Act in the past two years than in the previous 45, according to Reuters.

The Kinston petition was filed in 2008 over a move to omit candidates’ party affiliations from ballots, which the DOJ blocked because it would make black voters more likely to vote for the wrong person. Shelby County’s appeal comes after the D.C. Circuit upheld the pre-clearance requirement. In 2006, Congress voted to extend the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years, placing more requirements on local and state governments in states with histories of discrimination. These cases argue that the state and local governments are excessively burdened by the law.

The Supreme Court upheld Section 5 in 2009, but Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion carefully left open the option to strike it down later. Roberts wrote, “In part due to the success of that legislation, we are now a very different Nation…Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

A study released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that Section 5 continues to be very much needed to protect voter rights. An analysis of the ten states which have implemented voter ID laws found that the new requirements place substantial burdens on low incomer and minority voters, who have limited access to offices that issue the proper ID, face an effective “poll tax” through fees required for the necessary documentation, such as birth certificates or passports, and can’t schedule appointments within these offices’ irregular hours. Other reports have found that 18 percent of elderly voters, 25 percent of black voters, and 20 percent of Asian voters all lack ID and risk disenfranchisement by these new laws.

Though the alleged gunman at the theater shooting last Friday was armed to the teeth, able to fire off 60 rounds in a minute, and dressed fully in bulletproof gear, former Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce thinks one of the people in the theater should have been able to take him down.

In a Facebook post that has since been deleted, Pearce criticized the people in the theater for a lack of courage and for not being armed, saying that if they had been, they could have saved lives. “All that was needed is one Courages/Brave [sic] man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done,” he posted:

Pearce is best known for having authored Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB1070. He was exposed just last week for writing hateful, racist emails about Latinos in his state.

When Pearce was inevitably called out by local media for his insensitivity, he walked back his earlier statements, saying that he meant that gun control laws were entirely to blame, and not the victims themselves:

While Cinemark does have a no firearms policy, it is highly unlikely that someone would have been able to take down the alleged gunman. He was heavily armed, in full protective gear, threw tear gas before he opened fire, and was in a dark, crowded theater. Armed law enforcement officers responded within 90 seconds, and in that time he injured or killed 70 people.

At 7 pm tonight, Warren Lee Hill is scheduled to be executed by the state of Georgia. Hill is in all likelihood mentally disabled, which normally means that his execution would be unconstitutional by virtue of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Atkins v. Virginia. However, Georgia’s standard of proof of mental disability in death penalty cases is uniquely and impossibly high, meaning his execution will still go forward in spite of the strong evidence in his favor. Though the Supreme Court declined to hear Hill’s case in June, a second appeal to the high court and two state-level appeals are now Hill’s final chances. It can’t be hurting that there’s an outpouring of support for Hill:

Even the family of the victim do not wish to see Hill executed and has submitted an affidavit supporting commuting Hill’s death sentence to life without the possibility of parole, citing his mental retardation. President Carter and Rosalyn Carter have called for a commutation of Hill’s death sentence to life without parole, as have numerous mental health and disability groups. Several jurors who sat on Hill’s original jury have stated under oath that they believe that life without parole is the appropriate sentence. It was not offered to them as an option at trial in 1991. Earlier this week, the nation of France, a United Nations official, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for a stay of execution for Mr. Hill.

As Amnesty International notes, Hill’s case is not the only recent instance of an individual with serious mental disability being sentenced to death in spite of the Supreme Court prohibition. In Texas, Yokamon Hearn was killed by his government last week, whereas Ohio Governor John Kasich commuted John Jeffrey Eley’s sentence to life without parole when faced with evidence of cognitive impairment. One can only hope the Court chooses to follow the road paved in Ohio rather than Texas.

When Savannah Dietrich was sexually assaulted and her attackers distributed photographs of the incident, any law enforcement agent would have encouraged the 17 year-old Kentucky girl to name her assailants. But now, Dietrich is facing jail time for doing just that.

Disappointed and angered by what she considered a lenient plea deal for the two teens who assaulted her, Dietrich violated a court order and tweeted their names.

“I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell,” she wrote, according to The Courier-Journal:

“So many of my rights have been taken away by these boys,” said Dietrich, who waived confidentiality in her case to speak to The Courier-Journal. Her parents also gave their written permission for her to speak with the newspaper.

“I’m at the point, that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it,” she said. “If they really feel it’s necessary to throw me in jail for talking about what happened to me … as opposed to throwing these boys in jail for what they did to me, then I don’t understand justice.” [...]

“For months, I cried myself to sleep. I couldn’t go out in public places,” she told the newspaper, as her father, Michael, and attorneys sat nearby. “You just sit there and wonder, who saw (the pictures), who knows?” [...]

“I felt like they were given a very, very light deal,” Dietrich said. “I wasn’t happy with it, at all.”

The boys’ attorney claim that Dietrich violated a court order on not sharing the details of the case, but the girl gave no details of the boys’ pleas. Rather, she simply named the perpetrators — a right, some lawyers say, that should be protected under the first amendment, and that the judge’s gag order was unconstitutional.

Dietrich’s lawyers say she “tried not to violate what she believed the law to be.”

Underage victims’ names are not usually published, but Dietrich and her parents hope that her story will be shared publicly, and have given media permission to reveal the girl’s identity.