The Patriot Post® · Ninth Circuit Strikes Down CA Magazine Ban
The increasingly less liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision Friday, ruling that California’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Judge Kenneth Lee said, “California’s near-categorical ban of [large-capacity magazines] strikes at the core of the Second Amendment — the right to armed self-defense. Armed self-defense is a fundamental right rooted in tradition and the text of the Second Amendment. Indeed, from pre-colonial times to today’s post-modern era, the right to defend hearth and home has remained paramount. California’s law imposes a substantial burden on this right to self-defense.” Therefore, he concluded, “It cannot stand.” If standard-capacity magazines are illegal, what does the Second Amendment really protect? This is a small but important win for Americans’ Second Amendment rights in the nation’s most leftist state.
For one thing, the Ninth Circuit’s decision is a clear rebuke of Senator Kamala Harris’s stance against the Second Amendment. Of California’s former attorney general, National Shooting Sports Foundation spokesman Mark Oliva pointedly observed, “During her short-lived presidential campaign, she demanded gun-control legislation within 100 days and threatened executive actions if Congress didn’t deliver. Senator Harris was clear when she said gun control would be an administration priority. Her platform included entertaining forced confiscation of lawfully owned semiautomatic rifles, redefining ‘sporting purpose’ for lawful firearm possession, criminalizing private firearm transfers and repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. In fact, she supports politicizing the Department of Justice and using the weight of the federal government to harass a constitutionally protected industry in a series of frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt manufacturers.”
Last October, Harris spoke to the leftist anti-gun lobby March for Our Lives and expressed her support for the forced confiscation of firearms. “We have to have a buyback program and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” Harris said. “It’s got to be smart. We’ve got to do it the right way but there are five million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets but doing it the right way.”
Once again, the facts on homicides using firearms and specifically the erroneous term “assault weapons” simply do not comport with the anti-gun lobby’s fallacious narrative. As Kevin Williamson astutely notes, “So-called assault rifles are instruments of homicide only rarely — so rarely, in fact, that government records rarely break them out as their own category. In 2018, all rifles — from scary-looking black ‘assault rifles’ to granddad’s deer rifle — accounted for fewer than 300 murders, according to the FBI. More Americans are beaten to death with fists or baseball bats than are shot to death with ‘assault rifles,’ and five times as many are stabbed to death.” That’s true even though rifles like the much-maligned AR-15 use standard-capacity magazines holding 30 rounds, far above California’s ridiculous limit of 10.
Joe Biden’s choice of Harris as his running mate only serves to further cement him as the anti-Second Amendment candidate. As the NRA’s Jason Ouimet observed, “You’re dealing with a guy who’s got a complete and total anti-gun platform. And for that little bit of moderate that he wanted to purport, I think that went out the window.” Indeed, picking Harris — not to mention the Ninth Circuit ruling — serves to show just how far left Biden’s platform is.