It’s not just what you say, but how you say it that counts — and this judge did it beautifully.
A federal judge in California issued a blistering ruling Monday, blocking enforcement of a state handgun law ostensibly aimed at promoting gun safety but actually prohibiting the sale of new guns entirely.
And the order slashed the law from start to finish.
U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2003, began the 22-page ruling with the unwavering assertion that the Second Amendment “guarantees the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.”
“That right is so fundamental that to regulate conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text, the government must show more than that the regulation promotes an important interest like reducing accidental discharges or solving crime,” Carney wrote, citing the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision. (Emphasis added.)
“Rather, to be constitutional, regulations of Second Amendment rights must be consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the judge said.
A federal judge blocked key provisions of a California law that drastically restricts the sale of new handguns in the state, saying parts of the legislation violate the Second Amendment. https://t.co/fxmxK3PyS5
— FOX 11 Los Angeles (@FOXLA) March 21, 2023
According to ABC News, Carney’s ruling prohibiting the state from enforcing the law will not take effect for two weeks, giving the state time to appeal. In addition, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has pledged to “continue to lead efforts to advance and defend California’s gun safety laws.”
However, before deciding how to proceed, Bonta should consider Carney’s decision — as well as the history of this law in his own state.
laudatory goals such as reducing accidents and solving crime were among the justifications given by California lawmakers for the Unsafe Handguns Act, which was enacted in 2001 and amended in 2007 and 2013.
But, whatever the merits of those goals, the real liberal goal is gun control, limiting the Second Amendment, and the law has done a fantastic job at that.
Indeed, Carney wrote, it has had the practical effect of prohibiting the sale of newly manufactured handguns in California.
According to the judge, the 2007 amendments required indicators to signal when a gun has a round in its chamber and a mechanism to prevent guns from firing if a magazine is not fully inserted. According to Carney, the 2013 amendment required “microstamping,” a process in which every round fired includes microscopic characters identifying the weapon’s make and serial number.
“No handgun available in the world has all three of these features,” he said in the ruling.
That’s mainly because the final one — microstamping — literally does not even exist in commercial weapons “because the technology effectuating microstamping on a broad scale is simply not technologically feasible and commercially practical,” Carney wrote.
“Since 2007 … very few new handguns have been introduced for sale in California with those features,” he said. “Since 2013, when the microstamping requirement was introduced, not a single new semiautomatic handgun has been approved for sale in California. That is because the technology effectuating microstamping on a broad scale is simply not technologically feasible and commercially practical.”
In other words, good intentions — even the good intentions of California progressives — cannot create technology that does not exist.
“The result of this is that when Californians today buy a handgun at a store, they are largely restricted to models from over sixteen years ago,” Carney wrote.
The judge did not say “you idiots” after each sentence of the ruling, but the message is clear.
Aside from demolishing California lawmakers’ attempts to play King Canute with firearms manufacturers, Carney dismantled the law’s utterly illogical rationalizations, which cited Revolutionary-generation regulations to claim the law was “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
And this is where the law becomes ridiculous.
According to Carney’s decision, California’s case presented the Unsafe Handgun Act as simply a modern version of state laws from the early days of the United States, such as one that required weapons for sale to go through “proving” — that is, verification by an official inspector that the weapons could fire and that the shot would cover the expected distance.
Those are basic requirements that the gun being sold will meet the buyer’s needs — that it will hit the animal or human being fired at on the frontier farm or the mountain path, not that it will not accidentally go off.
“Put simply, requiring each model of a handgun to contain additional features to potentially help a user safely operate the handgun is completely different from ensuring that each firearm’s basic features were adequately manufactured for safe operation,” Carney concluded.
Another early American precedent cited by the judge governed the storage of gunpowder. However, those regulations were put in place to prevent accidental fires, according to Carney.
They were not intended to limit gun owners’ ability to obtain weapons or fire them when needed.
It’s almost insulting to the intelligence to have to respond to arguments like this when all California’s progressives are clearly interested in is the ability to control the Second Amendment rights that all Americans have by virtue of their citizenship. Carney, on the other hand, responded calmly.
“Californians have the constitutional right to acquire and use state-of-the-art handguns to protect themselves. They should not be forced to settle for decade-old models of handguns to ensure that they remain safe inside or outside the home,” the judge wrote.
“Because enforcing those requirements implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment, and the government fails to point to any well-established historical analogs that are consistent with them, those requirements are unconstitutional and their enforcement must be preliminarily enjoined,” he said.
To reiterate, California’s handgun law “implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment” and has no historical basis in the United States. That sounds like pretty much every gun-grabbing left’s goal.
“A preliminary injunction is an extraordinary and drastic remedy that may only be awarded upon a clear showing that the moving party is entitled to relief,” Carney wrote.
However, he stated that in this case, the “extraordinary and drastic remedy” is justified by the circumstances.
Carney’s decision made that abundantly clear, and he didn’t just dismiss California’s arguments; he demolished them.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his attorney general should consider this when deciding whether to file an appeal.