is flat-out unconstitutional. And it won’t stand. And if the courts end up infringing on this right, we will see a TON of “Irish Democracy.” We are already are seeing this even now, but it will explode.
U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez delivered another scathing rebuke to the state of California on Thursday, just weeks after declaring the state’s ban on “large capacity” magazines unconstitutional. This time around it was the state’s ban on “assault weapons” that was before the judge, in a case known as Miller v. Bonta. Benitez was unsparing in his criticism of the law, which he says bars ordinary Californians from possessing commonly-owned arms that are protected by the language of the Second Amendment.
We are a constitutional Republic. CA needs to start acting constitutionally.
He did indeed. So what happens next? Benitez granted a 10-day stay on his permanent injunction, so if the past is any prologue California Attorney General Rob Bonta will appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit and request a stay, the Ninth Circuit will grant the stay and allow the law to remain in place during the appeal, and then a majority of Ninth Circuit judges will start to play keep-away-from-the-Supreme-Court with the case. Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom will bizarrely bloviate about the “rights regression” in Benitez’s decision, even though it’s California’s rights suppression that’s the issue. And sooner or later the Supreme Court will get ahold of this case, though not nearly as quickly as we’d like. The “assault weapons” case that should get to SCOTUS first is Bianchi v. Brown, which has been pending in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals for almost a year now. Even if Bianchi gets there first, Judge Benitez’s opinion is going to be extensively cited by the plaintiffs challenging Maryland’s “assault weapons ban,” and he’s given them plenty of legal ammunition to use before the Supreme Court when the time comes.
