You Need to Read This

Duncan v. Becerra, United States District Court, Southern District of California.

When the decision begins:

Individual liberty and freedom are not outmoded concepts. “The judiciary is – and is often the only – protector of individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy.” –Senator Ted Kennedy, Senate Hearing on the Nomination of Robert Bork, 1987.

you KNOW you’re in for a good read. Hat tip to Joe Huffman.

Edited to add this excerpt from page 62:

Ten years of a federal ban on large-capacity magazines did not stop mass shootings nationally. Twenty years of a California ban on large capacity magazines have not stopped mass shootings in California. Section 32310 is a failed policy experiment that has not achieved its goal. But it has daily trenched on the federal Constitutional right of self-defense for millions of its citizens. On the full record presented by the Attorney General, and evidence upon which there is no genuine issue, whatever the fit might be, it is not a reasonable fit.

vi. irony

Perhaps the irony of § 32310 escapes notice. The reason for the adoption of the Second Amendment was to protect the citizens of the new nation from the power of an oppressive state. The anti-federalists were worried about the risk of oppression by a standing army. The colonies had witnessed the standing army of England marching through Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts, on a mission to seize the arms and gunpowder of the militia and the Minutemen—an attack that ignited the Revolutionary war. With Colonists still hurting from the wounds of war, the Second Amendment guaranteed the rights of new American citizens to protect themselves from oppressors foreign and domestic. So, now it is ironic that the State whittles away at the right of its citizens to defend themselves from the possible oppression of their State.

It’s good before page 62, but it just keeps getting better.

I can’t imagine what the 9th Circus will do with this decision when it’s inevitably appealed.

District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez for either the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court.