Instead of allowing some bureaucrat or attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice to determine if you can be prosecuted for selling a hunting video, in which you broke no laws, the high court found that the First Amendment protects your right to share your law-abiding hunting, trapping or dog training activities.

The U.S. Supreme Court went so far as to rule that if the statute were allowed to stand: “The only thing standing between defendants who sell such depictions and five years in federal prison—other than the mercy of a prosecutor—is the statute’s exceptions clause. Subsection (b) exempts from prohibition ‘any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.’  The Government argues that this clause substantially narrows the statute’s reach: News reports about animal cruelty have “journalistic” value; pictures of bullfights in Spain have ‘historical’ value; and instructional hunting videos have ‘educational value.’” But allowing the government to determine the “value” of your free speech would allow censorship of anything the government didn’t deem to be politically correct.

Stefan Tahmassebi, NRA Deputy General Counsel, added, “This case went far beyond the intent of animal cruelty laws, which already exist in every state, and jeopardized various forms of legitimate and popular hunting media—videos, magazines, websites, photography, etc. It is a significant victory for First Amendment rights.”

Recognizing how U.S. v. Stevens jeopardized the rights of all hunters to share images of their sport, as well as the hunting-media industry in which it is a major presence, NRA forcefully weighed in with amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, prepared and filed by the law firm of Hunton & Williams.

Clearly NRA’s defense of hunters’ rights proved useful, because Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority decision cites the NRA brief two times. Information from the NRA helped the Court to determine that the popular hunting-media industry “… exceeds the estimated demand for crush videos or animal fighting depictions by several orders of magnitude.” The brief also helped to refute government attorneys’ arguments that the statute’s exemption (“Subsection (a) does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value.”) would ensure that the traditional distribution of hunting images would be shielded from prosecution.

Justice Samuel Alito was the only justice who didn’t concur. But his dissenting opinion only disagreed with the scope of the decision. He didn’t want to throw out the entire statute. He instead argued for judicial restraint by simply narrowing the scope of the statute to what the U.S. Congress had originally determined it to read, not to what some U.S. attorneys decided it meant.