An injunction blocking a California law that threatens gun owners with fines or imprisonment if they don’t surrender or otherwise dispose of “high-capacity” magazines (the term refers to anything over ten rounds) has been upheld by, if you can believe it, the Ninth Circuit.
David French has the details in a column published yesterday. He cites with approval a passage from the original lower-court inunction:
Violent gun use is a constitutionally-protected means for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves from criminals. The phrase “gun violence’ may not be invoked as a talismanic incantation to justify any exercise of state power. Implicit in the concept of public safety is the right of law-abiding people to use firearms and the magazines that make them work to protect themselves, their families, their homes, and their state against all armed enemies, foreign and domestic. To borrow a phrase, it would indeed be ironic if, in the name of public safety and reducing gun violence, statutes were permitted to subvert the public’s Second Amendment rights ”” which may repel criminal gun violence and which ultimately ensure the safety of the Republic.
He continues with an important point that should be made more often:
Much of the modern argument over gun control revolves around the effort to label certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles (and magazines over ten rounds) as “military style’ weapons that are effectively unprotected by the Second Amendment. Yet the Ninth Circuit’s language ”” rooted in the history of the amendment ”” links constitutional protection to a weapon’s potential militia use. In other words, the “military style’ moniker actually connects the guns in question to the historic purpose of the right to bear arms.
Gun-control zealots want it both ways: they attack the individual right to keep and bear arms by focusing on the Second Amendment’s prefatory clause “A well-regulated militia…”, and then go after enormously popular rifle platforms as “military-style” weapons. (These arguments are obviously contradictory — but the end, as always, justifies the means.)
Further on, there’s this:
For now, hundreds of thousands of California gun owners remain law-abiding. They don’t have to face the choice between surrendering the magazines that help keep their families safe and complying with a confiscatory law. Already, there were indications of passive resistance. As the Sacramento Bee reported last year, “Talk to gun owners, retailers and pro-gun sheriffs across California and you’ll get something akin to an eye roll when they’re asked if gun owners are going to voluntarily part with their property because Democratic politicians and voters who favor gun control outnumber them and changed the law.’
Read the rest here.