I never hate to see a little good gun news — particularly out of California.
California can't ban residents from buying modern handguns.
Californians running out to get their hands on the goods as soon as the news broke:
That's the ruling handed down by Federal District Judge Cormac J. Carney, a George W. Bush appointee, on Monday. He found California's requirement that all new pistols sold in the state include a series of uncommon or even theoretical safety devices is unconstitutional. He ruled the regulation, which has resulted in no new handgun models being sold to civilians in nearly a decade, violates the Second Amendment.
The California law in question, the "Unsafe Handgun Act," required a huge host of safety devices on firearms sold in the state. The law allowed for additional requirements to be imposed by the state over time, one of which was a "microstamping" identification technology that has never actually been applied to any gun for sale commercially.
The obvious intent was to bring a summary end to handgun sales there. It worked.
Judge Carney saw through it:
"These regulations are having a devastating impact on Californians' ability to acquire and use new, state-of-the-art handguns," Judge Cormac wrote. "Since 2007, when the [loaded chamber indicator] and [magazine disconnect safety] requirements were introduced, very few new handguns have been introduced for sale in California with those features. Since 2013, when the microstamping requirement was introduced, not a single new semiautomatic handgun has been approved for sale in California."
There's only one U.S. constitutional amendment that could get absolutely trashed on for a full decade before anybody did anything about it.
It's worth pointing out that His Honor in making the decision cited in part last year's New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen Supreme Court decision. That ruling is upending years and years of miserable gun restrictions in the United States, in large part because it applies a much more stringent standard of gun regulation by which the government must abide:
[T]he government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this Nation's historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual's conduct falls outside the Second Amendment's "unqualified command."
