The Handgun Registry gun control statute was overturned by Cormac Carney, the District Judge in Santa Anna, California on Monday, March 20, because he found that it violated the Second Amendment’s assurance of the right to keep and bear arms.
This is the most recent setback for those fighting to overturn the second amendment since the U.S. Supreme Court expanded gun rights in 2022. The repeal will go into force fourteen days after the decision.
The Unsafe Handgun Act of California essentially stopped the development of new, safer semiautomatic handgun designs and required all new semiautomatic pistols sold to Californians to have special safety features not necessary in other states. A requirement for microstamping ammunition was eventually added to the statute, but it has never been put into effect.
The State has consciously recognized Sacramento’s purposeful selection of pistols authorized for sale to Californians as a policy result goal. So California gun buyers will have access to the full range of decades’ worth of handgun technology advancements in just 15 days.
Overnight, firearms previously restricted to law enforcement will once again be available for purchase and ownership by regular people. There will be improvements in size, dependability, ergonomics, and safety. An era in which US manufacturers had to spend money on so-called “CA models,” which attempted to conform to California’s standards but frequently suffered considerable performance degradations relative to the same pistol available in the other 49 states, will come to an end.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, rejected a challenge to the statute in 2018. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in June that gun control laws must be consistent with the country’s “historical practice” of gun control laws, a new lawsuit was brought in 2022. Judge Carney notably said in the decision that Californians “should not be compelled to settle with decade-old models of handguns” and that the state had failed to provide any historical precedent for the Unsafe Handgun Act.
The court’s decision supports the legal theory that other gun control measures nationwide will probably be subject to similar “historical” test scrutiny. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, states have sometimes seized on hyperbole to support their claims that they have always had the right to enact gun control laws by citing instances of prejudice and oppression in the United States as “historical” evidence. Supporters of the 2A have argued that this is against the principles of both the U.S. Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence.
The courts’ application of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to these 2nd Amendment issues has not gone over well with them. Other 2nd Amendment issues are still pending in California and other states like New York. The judgement in California might be a sign of more rulings that will come to light as 2023 goes on.
