PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Judge's ruling in California highlights gun control flaws :: 07/11/2017
CRITICS often argue that gun control policies are both impractical and ineffective. A judge's ruling in a recent California case validates those views.
Last fall, California voters approved an initiative making it illegal to possess a gun magazine holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Violations could result in criminal penalties and up to one year in jail. The law included exemptions for active and retired police officers, employees of armored vehicle businesses, and actors using magazines as props, but not for members of the military or firearm instructors.
A lawsuit challenged the law's constitutionality, and U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez sided with the challengers.
Benitez noted California's gun laws are “complicated.”
“The language used, the internally-referenced provisions, the interplay among them, and the plethora of other gun regulations, have made the State's magazine laws difficult to understand for all but the most learned experts,” Benitez wrote.
As it turns out, not even lawyers in the California attorney general's office may qualify as “learned experts” on this topic. During the preliminary injunction hearing, Benitez noted that “the attorney for the Attorney General, although well prepared, was not able to describe all of the various exceptions to the dispossession and criminalization components” of the new magazine law.
“Who could blame her?” the judge wrote. “The California matrix of gun control laws is among the harshest in the nation” and “filled with criminal law traps for people of common intelligence who desire to obey the law.”
Benitez wrote, “Too much complexity fails to give fair notice and violates due process.” He concluded the California law was likely to be found to violate citizens' Second Amendment rights, and agreed to a preliminary injunction.
Just as notably, Benitez concluded the statute "is not a reasonable fit as a means to achieve the State's important objectives.”
Instead, Benitez wrote that the evidence submitted by the California attorney general consisted of “incomplete studies from unreliable sources upon which experts base speculative explanations and predictions. The evidentiary record is a potpourri of news pieces, State-generated documents, conflicting definitions of ‘mass shooting,' amorphous harms to be avoided, and a homogeneous mass of horrible crimes in jurisdictions near and far for which large capacity magazines were not the cause.”
One exhibit was a news article examining 13 shootings in Australia “going back to 1867 in which there are no mentions of large capacity magazines.”
Benitez noted some exhibits contradicted other exhibits submitted by the attorney general, with one expert cited actually suggesting the impact of the magazine ban on gun violence would be small.
Of 10 specific mass-shooting incidents highlighted in California, the record indicated the magazine ban would have had no effect in eight. In the other two cases, the killers violated existing California gun laws.
Thus, Benitez concluded California's ammunition magazine ban appeared “a haphazard solution likely to have no effect on an exceedingly rare problem …”
Critics argue gun control laws are intended primarily to disarm law-abiding citizens, not to improve public safety. While this one judge's ruling won't be the last word in this case, it suggests those critics have a point.
