Nothing more than an ordinary hobby:
A federal judge in California on Friday overturned the state’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, which he called a “failed experiment,” prompting a sharp retort from the state’s governor.
California prohibited the sale of assault weapons in 1989. The law was challenged in a suit filed in 2019 against the state’s attorney general by plaintiffs including James Miller, a California resident, and the San Diego County Gun Owners, a political action committee.
The judge, Roger T. Benitez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, wrote that sections of the state’s penal code that defined assault weapons and restricted their use were “hereby declared unconstitutional and shall be enjoined.”
But the judge said he had granted a 30-day stay of the ruling at the request of Attorney General Rob Bonta, a move that would allow Mr. Bonta to appeal it.
Judge Benitez wrote that the case was about “what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment.”
“It should be an easy question and answer,” Judge Benitez, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush, continued. “Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where constitutional rights are concerned.”
The judge wrote that the firearms banned under the state’s law were not “bazookas, howitzers or machine guns,” but rather “fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”
In a statement late Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the ruling “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians.”
Mr. Newsom also criticized the opening lines of Judge Benitez’s decision, in which he wrote that, like a Swiss Army knife, the AR-15 assault rifle “is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”
The AR-15 re-entered the American gun market in 2004 after the end of a federal assault weapons ban. It has a national following among gun owners, but it has also been used in mass shootings and vilified by its critics as a weapon of mass murder.
Right. It’s been “vilified” as a weapon os mass murder. No, it has been correctly described by any sane human being as a weapon of mass murder. Like this one, for instance, perpetrated by a Bushmaster AR-15.
On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza kills 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Earlier that day, he killed his mother at the home they shared.
The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a gunman killed 32 students and teachers before committing suicide.
Shortly after 9:30 a.m., 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot through a plate-glass window next to Sandy Hook’s locked front entrance in order to gain access to the school. Hearing the noise, the school principal and school psychologist went to investigate and were shot and killed by Lanza, who was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, two semiautomatic pistols and multiple rounds of ammunition. Lanza also shot and wounded two other Sandy Hook staff members.
He then entered two first-grade classrooms, where he gunned down two teachers and 15 students in one room and two teachers and five students in the other room. The children Lanza murdered, 12 girls and 8 boys, were 6 and 7 years old. Twelve first-graders from the two classrooms survived.
But hey, boys like this need their toys or they just don’t feel freeeeee!
This ruling is grotesque. California’s law has been in place for over 30 years and until now, even the far right jurists have agreed that states have a right to regulate guns on certain criteria. Even Scalia believed that! But this new court is very likely to just let their freak flag fly and allow American nutcases to carry whatever killing machine they choose to intimidate and terrorize their fellow Americans at will. That, after all, is what they are really talking about when they rail against “tyranny.” They’re talking about you.
Update: I thought this was an extremely effective argument: