• We were asked “Why don’t we see juries involved in all of these Second Amendment cases? The simple answer is “they are not needed”. Read on for why.

    Court cases are decided in two different ways, on the merits of the case, and procedurally.

    Consider the question “Does the District of Columbia’s restriction on having a functional firearm within the home violate the Second Amendment?”

    Prior to 2008 many courts were using the collective right interpretation of the Second Amendment. With this in mind the most of these cases were dismissed for procedural reason. I.e. if you were not the militia challenging the restriction you did not have standing. Standing is a procedural issue.

    Cases that are decided on a procedural basis can be brought up again once the procedural issue is corrected.
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  • Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the United States District Court Southern District of California has granted a Preliminary Injunction against California’s Unsafe Handgun act.

    He enjoined the chamber loaded indicator, magazine disconnect mechanism, microstamping, and three-for-one removal provisions.

    The judge then stayed the injunction pending appeal or further hearing on the matter.

    It is highly likely that this case and Boland will be combined at the Ninth Circuit Court.

    We keep winning. The infringers are losing ground constantly. We are going to win, it just takes time.

    Case 3:20-cv-02190-DMS-DEB

            

  • On 2023-03-31 United States District Judge Katherine Menendez issued summary judgement for the plaintiffs(good guys) allowing young adults to receive government permission to carry handguns in Minnesota.

    The State of Minnesota requires a person to obtain a permit to lawfully carry a handgun in public, but does not issue permits to anyone under the age of twenty-one. The Plaintiffs, who are 18-to-20-year-old individuals and firearms advocacy organizations with members in that age range, argue that the minimum age requirement in Minnesota’s permit-to-carry law violates their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The parties have filed cross-motions for summary judgment. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022), compels the conclusion that Minnesota’s permitting age restriction is unconstitutional, and Plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law.
    — Summary Judgement and Opinion 0:21-cv-01348 District Court of Minnesota

    The state claimed Minnesota’s permit to carry statute is facially constitutional as a matter of law. — Memorandum in support for Summary Judgement for the defendants at P. 14. They get their claim by contending that the Supreme Court has approved infringing on the rights of 18-20 year olds.
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  • The Ninth Circus Court three judge panel has again displayed its dislike for the rights of The People by staying the district courts preliminary injunction against the state.

    The District Court found that the plaintiffs(good guys) were likely to succeed on the merits and had all the other requirements to be granted a preliminary injunction. In order to keep things from yo-yoing the court put a 14 day stay in order for the state to appeal to the Ninth Circus Court.

    The preliminary injunction is stayed as to the chamber load indicator and magazine disconnect mechanism requirements of California’s Unsafe Handgun Act. — Order of the Ninth Circuit Court

    The Ninth Circus Court is ordering opening brief by April 28, 2023 (bad guys). Answering brief by May 26, 2023 from the good guys. And the reply from the bad guys within 21 days of the answering brief being filed.

    This means that the Ninth Circus will not hear the case until at least June, likely longer. In the meantime only the microstamp requirement is enjoined.

    Hagar says I shouldn’t call people names, it makes me smaller. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has earned the title “Ninth Circus Court”. At one point I read that by percentages or absolutes, I don’t remember which, more of the Ninth’s cases have been overturned at the Supreme Court than any other Appellate Court.

    Normally I just let one “circus” slip through, the these three dunces have earned not only dunce caps, but clown noses as well.

            

  • It was suggested by it’s just Boris that a founding era firearm safety requirement could be used to support the California Roster system. In particular, they suggested that proof testing would be a close enough match.

    It isn’t. Proofing a firearm is entirely different from the idea of requiring or forbidding features.

    The original proofing was done to make sure that guns did not blow up in your face. Because of the metallurgy of the time it was not a good idea to trust a pressure vessel until it had been tested. To this end “proofing” was required.

    Once completed, all of the individual parts would be sent to one of the royal arsenals to be carefully inspected for quality and to ensure they were “to pattern” with the control piece. If the parts passed inspection they would receive an inspector’s stamp and be fitted to a gunstock along with the other parts of the musket. The stocks were supplied to the arsenals by rough stockers who selected the appropriate blank stocks (specifically, seasoned walnut heartwood) from timber mills throughout Britain. The blank stocks were sent to the arsenals, and the final assembly of the musket was completed at the arsenal by the master gunsmiths employed there. Each musket was fired with an excessive amount of powder to ensure its strength and received a final acceptance stamp if it passed. This was known as proofing. Once the production process was complete, the muskets could then be issued to the state for use. The raw materials—such as coal, brass, iron and wood—had to pass through several processes to reach the final product and would have gained value with each step. The value of the work put into each step would culminate into the final value of the finished musket. This value, plus use-value, is the complete value the Board of Ordnance would have paid for each musket.
    — The Production of Muskets and Their Effects in the Eighteenth Century

    Emphasis added.

    What is very important about the requirement for “proofing”, from a Second Amendment view, is that no class of arm, “pattern” was outright banned.

    What was happening is that a level of third party quality control was being performed, by the government.

    At times the proofing wasn’t done a the royal proofing houses but was instead done at the manufacturer’s location.

    With the California roster, the concept is that if California doesn’t like the weapon it is banned. Not that the weapon has to perform as designed and not blow up.

    In addition, while proofing was required in Europe, I can find no regulations that actually require the proofing of firearms from 1790-1799. I used both Google and Duke Center for Firearms Law. It is likely that with a bit more work I could find something at Duke but the real proof is that the state has not made the argument in any of the cases I’ve read.

            

  • The GFZ admin had a short discussion and decided that we do want to add links for those organizations that are fighting for the Second Amendment. To that end, if you have a favorite organization let us know in the comments.

    There have been a number of cases that are making progress, I’ll continue to bring updates as I get them or I find new cases.

    Hagar has a couple of new articles out and J.Kb and Miguel keep cranking them out.

    In the next week I’m going to do an article on PACER and RECAP. PACER is where you buy court documents. RECAP is a site that collection PACER documents for others to use. I’m looking at being able to put out a call for our readers to add documents from PACER to RECAP. Since you get $30 dollars worth of PACER documents per bill period free, this might work well for us.

    We are going to be doing some site work later this week as it is time for a WordPress update. This will cause a brief outage.

    Anything else you want to tell us about, feel free in the comments.

            

  • B.L.U.F. In a strategic move the State of California is appealing to the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals in the “Unsafe Handgun Act” case. The district judge found the UHA unconstitutional by requiring Chamber Load Indicator(CLI), Magazine Disconnect Mechanism (MDM), and microstamping. The state is appealing the CLI and MDM but NOT microstamping.

    US District Court Judge for the Central District of California, Judge Cormac J. Carney, came to the right decision but his analysis to get there was and is weak. This has lead to the likelihood of this appeal being granted. It was likely to be granted by the Ninth Circuit Court because the en banc court hasn’t seen an infringement they didn’t support.

    The Ninth Circuit court is so anti-gun that when a three judge panel found in favor of the plaintiffs(good guys) in Duncan v. Bonta the Second Amendment community was shocked. One of the judges on that panel wrote an opinion explaining exactly how the en banc court was going to find for the state infringements.

    In Boland v. Bonta the judge did not find that the UHA was a ban, instead he found that requiring CDL, MDM, and microsamping created a de facto ban which made that part of the UHA unconstitutional.

    Consider a regulation that says “You are not allowed to have any firearm with a barleycorn front sight”. This reads like a ban because it is a ban. Now consider a regulation that says “You are only allowed to have firearms with barleycorn front sights.” This is also a ban. It just doesn’t read as clearly as the first.

    Now consider a regulation that says “You are only allowed to have firearms that are on this approved list.” That sounds sort of like a ban but maybe not. If the list is comprehensive to the point where you can buy whatever you want it doesn’t feel like a ban. In order to even have standing to challenge the ban you would have to prove to the court that you wanted to purchase a firearm not on the list and had attempted to do so.

    Now what if we add another part to the regulation “only firearms with barleycorn front sights can be placed on the list.” This has exactly the same effect as “You are only allowed to have firearms with barleycorn front sights.” It is a ban. If the state changes the list of firearms that it allows, it is still a ban.

    This is how the state of California bans handguns. They just don’t put modern handguns on the rooster and thus ban them from the State of California.

    The Question

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  • Enjoy a win!

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  • B.L.U.F. District Court of Delaware Judge Richard Gibson Andrews decided on 2023-03-27 that a ban on some firearms and some magazines was constitutional in denying a preliminary injunction.
    Slight updates to correct spelling and Judge’s name.
    Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, Inc v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security (1:22-cv-00951)

    Prior to Bruen the courts used a two step analysis that first determined if the regulation touched on the core right of the Second Amendment, self-defense. If it did then they then used a means-end balancing act where they considered just how much infringing was being done (just how much rape was done to you Mrs Jones? If it wasn’t too much rape then it really isn’t a big case and we don’t need to prosecute him as a felon.)

    Once the courts had determined there was infringement and had established just homehow much that infringement harmed the individuales core civil rights it used a balancing act against the public need as defined by the state. Thus if the state said that the regulation was going to make the public safer that would be balanced against just how much the individual was effected. The individual almost always lost this game.

    Post Bruen there are still two steps, the first step is determine whether ‘the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct’ — Memorandum Opinion at P.6 quoting Bruen. If the answer is yes, then the burden shifts to the state to show a history and tradition of analogous regulation from the time of the founding.

    If it is an arm then the individual’s conduct is presumptively protected by the Second Amendment.

    In order to win the case, the state has to prove only one of the following:
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  • The post WWII trials saw many many of the accused murders claim that they were “just following orders”. There was always somebody higher up that ordered them to murder people.

    What isn’t as well known is that the population, when asked “Why didn’t you try and stop these mass murders?”, replied with “We didn’t know.”

    The US military has rules that say you should not follow an illegal order.