CA 10+ Magazine Ban Overturned
Note that places like PSA and Magpul are already selling magazines to those behind enemy lines in CA!
California’s statute to confiscate all magazines over 10 rounds has been permanently enjoined by the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. The opinion was written by Judge Roger T. Benitez.
Previously, Judge Benitez had issued a preliminary injunction against the confiscation law, and the preliminary injunction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit, as discussed in this post. Today’s decision follows cross-motions for summary judgment, and makes the injunction permanent. The next step in Duncan v. Becerra will be an appeal to the Ninth Circuit by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
The 86-page opinion is the most thorough judicial analysis thus far of the magazine ban question. The opinion is founded on a careful analysis of the record, and thus provides an excellent basis for future appellate review on the merits, perhaps one day by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Covering all bases, the opinion analyzes the confiscation law under a variety of standards of review. First is the standard favored by Judge Benitez, what he calls “The Supreme Court’s Simple Heller Test.” In short, magazines over 10 rounds are plainly “in common use” “for lawful purposes like self-defense.” Ergo, they may not be confiscated. The analysis is similar to then-Judge Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion in the 2011 Heller II case in the D.C. Circuit.
The Duncan opinion then examines the confiscation statute under various levels of “heightened scrutiny”: categorical invalidation, strict scrutiny, and intermediate scrutiny. The confiscation statute is found unconstitutional under each of these standards.
Under the various heightened scrutiny tests, the government bears the burden of proof. The opinion explains in depth why the evidence put forward by the California Attorney General does not come close to carrying that burden. The core problem is that the Attorney General’s evidence, which relies heavily on expert declarations, is speculative, shoddy, or unrelated to the statute at issue.
Nor are there any “longstanding” laws that create a tradition of banning magazines over ten rounds–notwithstanding the Attorney General’s efforts to invent such a tradition based on state machine gun controls enacted in the 1920s or 1930s.
The Attorney General’s argument that law-abiding citizens do not “need” magazines over 10 rounds is rejected as directly contrary to Heller, which defers to the choices of the American people, not the government, about what is appropriate for self-defense. Several incidents detailed at the beginning of the opinion describe the harms suffered by crime victims who had insufficient defensive ammunition capacity.
Read the rest of the article: https://reason.com/volokh/2019/03/29/district-court-permanently-enjoins-calif