In a polarizing decision on Friday night, a federal judge struck down California’s 32-year-old ban on assault weapons, ruling that it violated Americans’ constitutional right to own guns for self protection. In the 94-page decision, Judge Roger Benitez compared an AR-15 rifle to a “Swiss army knife” and falsely claimed that more Californians had died from the Covid-19 vaccine than from mass shootings. [See footnote]
Although the decision has sparked outrage in California, it has the potential to have a much broader national impact. If the case is appealed to the supreme court, the court’s new conservative majority could use the legal battle to rule that banning military-style “assault weapons” is unconstitutional, undermining the Biden administration’s endorsement of a national ban.
Here’s what you need to know about the decision:
What did the judge rule?
California’s longstanding rule prohibits the manufacturing, purchasing, and possession of firearms that are categorized as assault weapons. Judge Benitez, who was nominated to the bench by George W Bush in 2003 and has a history of siding with gun lobbyists on matters such as background checks and magazine capacity limits, found that California’s restrictions violate the second amendment. Among other arguments, he reasons that the state’s goal to prevent mass shootings via the ban puts residents at risk of not having the means to defend themselves against home intruders.
Does the decision come as a surprise?
California judges have mostly shared a consensus on the constitutionality of state gun laws, including restrictions on high-capacity magazines and mandated background checks. But Benitez is an “extreme outlier”, said Ari Freilich, the state policy director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Benitez previously decided to toss out California’s 10-round magazine capacity limit and blocked background checks for ammunition sales.
Freilich also points to a rule in the southern district court of California that refers cases to judges with prior experience in dealing with whatever issue is at hand. In the case of the state’s most contested gun laws, this means that gun cases in this particular court tend to end up on Benitez’s docket.
“The gun lobby’s strategy is to file identical cases in many courts and hope they strike gold and get a judge that will side with their radical thoughts,” Freilich said. “Most judges kick these claims out of court in the early stages. But this one extreme outlier, Judge Benitez, has continued to put decades of progress in peril.”
What does this change right now?
For the moment, not much. The state’s current assault weapon ban will still be in effect until California’s appeals court hands down a final ruling that will apply to the entire state. The judge put in place a 30-day stay – which suspends any implementation – so that the state attorney general, Rob Bonta, can file an appeal. There is a conflicting ruling in the state’s central district court that upheld the state’s current assault weapon restriction, which means the fate of this policy will probably be decided by a panel of judges in the ninth circuit court of appeals.
While the ninth circuit used to be “famously liberal” and would typically reverse any pro-gun rulings by lower courts, the appointment of new judges by Donald Trump has made the appeals court “much more balanced”, making the court’s ruling on the assault weapon ban case less clear, said Adam Winkler, a firearms law expert at the University of California Los Angeles. No matter what the ninth circuit rules, the case could be appealed to the US supreme court, where several conservative justices have signaled their eagerness to revisit second amendment cases.
What do we know about how effective the ban was?
Though continued high-profile mass shootings have called the efficacy of California’s strict gun laws into question, gun violence prevention advocates contend that the state’s restrictions on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons can mean the difference between a single-victim shooting and mass casualty event.
Nationally, though, handguns are used in the majority of gun murders, with rifles listed as the murder weapon in fewer than 4% of murders from 2010 to 2014, according to FBI data.
“While bans on military-style weapons are very popular in the gun safety movement, these guns are popular firearms, they’re not used relatively often to commit crimes, and most of the crimes committed with these weapons could and would be easily committed with handguns or other substitutes,” Winkler says.
Why have gun owners continued to fight against California’s assault weapon ban?
Gun owners have argued that the “cosmetic” tweaks the California law required were annoying, but didn’t make much difference in the guns’ fundamental lethality, or in the market for military-style weapons.
Chuck Rossi, a co-founder of Open Source Defense, a Silicon Valley gun rights group, said he had spent hundreds of dollars modifying his existing guns so they would meet the requirements of California’s assault weapons law.
Many gun manufacturers already made “California compliant versions” of their AR-15 style rifles, Rossi said, so anyone who wanted these kinds of weapons in the state could already buy them.
“If this ruling stands, it will make no appreciable difference. The guns are already there,” Rossi said. “This hand-wringing, like, ‘this is the end of the world,’ ‘these guns are going to flood our streets’ – they’re there in the millions already. It’s insane to think this is a significant change.’”
What are the national implications of this decision?
While a national ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, seven states and the District of Columbia still have laws regulating the sale and possession of certain military-style weapons.
For years, federal courts have upheld these assault weapon bans as compatible with second amendment gun rights. But after Trump appointed three pro-gun justices to the supreme court, some legal experts now expect the nation’s highest court to begin expanding the scope of the second amendment, and invalidating some gun control laws.
“I think it’s possible to imagine five justices on the court right now who would agree with Judge Benitez that California’s ban on assault weapons is unconstitutional,” Winkler said.
In a 2011 dissent written before Trump nominated him to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh argued that the District of Columbia’s assault weapon ban was unconstitutional and that since semiautomatic rifles were “in common use” they should not be banned, a record that gun control advocates warned made it likely that he would go on to strike down bans on AR-15s.
Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump supreme court appointee, previously argued that barring all felons from owning firearms, one of the few basic restrictions on American gun ownership, was unconstitutional.
Gun rights advocates said they were cautiously optimistic about the case eventually making it to the supreme court. “I think if they take it, the ban would be held unconstitutional,” said Dave Kopel, a pro-gun attorney who has been involved in previous cases challenging assault weapons bans.
This footnote was added on 8 June 2021. The judge provided no citation for his assertion about deaths from Covid vaccine. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that it has not established a causal link to Covid-19 vaccines, and that it is investigating a plausible causal relationship between the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and blood clotting. In May, the agency said it was investigating 28 potential clotting cases, including three deaths, across the nation.