JONATHAN TURLEY California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed the long-anticipated “Responsible Gun Manufacturing Act,” Assembly Bill 1127, a law that may now trigger a major challenge under the Second Amendment. The law banned the Glock semi-automatic handguns that are a favorite of American gun owners, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The law constitutes one of the most ambitious gun bans since the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) that gun ownership is an individual right. At the time, Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that the Second Amendment protects all types of firearms “in common use at the time” for “lawful purposes like self-defense.”
Gun control advocates have been chipping away at this concept by arguing that a variety of popular weapons, such as the AR-15, cannot be considered “in common use at the time” of the ratification.
Scalia, however, joined Justice Clarence Thomas in 2015 in a dissent in the denial of certiorari in Friedman v. Highland Park, involving a local ban on semi-automatic firearms. Thomas wrote that “several Courts of Appeals… have upheld categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes” and that such rulings are “noncompliance with our Second Amendment precedents.”
Thomas noted that such rulings suggested that states could ban “AR-style semiautomatic rifles” even though an “overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.”
In the case of the AR-15, an estimated one in 20 Americans own such weapons. The Glock is even more popular. In 2021 alone, industry data shows that Glock produced 581,944 handguns with another 465,117 in 2022. It is also the weapon of choice for an estimated over 65 percent of law enforcement agencies.
…
Read Full Article Here…(jonathanturley.org)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
Live Stream + Chat (zutalk.com)
Be First to Comment