Source.

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a gun rights group’s challenge to an assault weapons ban the state of Connecticut adopted after a gunman in 2012 killed 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) filed a lawsuit in September, arguing the 2013 ban violated the right to bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, citing a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that expanded gun rights.

That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, was issued by the court’s 6-3 conservative majority and held the Second Amendment protects a person’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.

The decision also announced a new test to assess the legality of gun restrictions, saying they must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” NAGR said Connecticut’s law failed to meet that standard.

But U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in New Haven in a 74-page ruling rejected those claims, saying the group failed to establish that assault weapons and large capacity magazines are commonly bought and used for self-defense.

She got the test wrong.  The test is “for lawful purposes.”

Here is the decision.

Defendants have submitted persuasive evidence that assault weapons and LCMs are more often sought out for their militaristic characteristics than for self-defense, that these characteristics make the weapons disproportionately dangerous to the public based on their increased capacity for lethality, and that assault weapons and LCMs are more often used in crimes and mass shootings than in self-defense. Defendants also show through the submission of historically analogous statutes and expert declarations that when a modern innovation in firearm technology results in a particular type of weapon or method of carrying being utilized for unlawful purposes to terrorize and endanger the public, the Nation has a longstanding history and tradition of regulating those aspects of the weapons or manners of carry that correlate with rising firearm violence.

[ … ]

Heller explained that it was not “permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed” because the handgun was the “quintessential self-defense weapon,” “possessing characteristics making it well-suited for self-defense.” Id. at 629. “Whatever the reason,” Heller found, “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.” Id. at 629.

Bruen, perhaps recognizing the shortcomings of a purely statistical inquiry into possession, avoided that pitfall by framing the relevant inquiry as being whether the weapons are “‘in common use’ today for self-defense.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2134 (emphasis added); see also Heller, 554 U.S. at 594 (discussing the origins of the pre-existing right codified by the Second Amendment as the “right of self-preservation” permitting a citizen to “repel force by force” when “the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury.”)

Now, go see Bruen pages 39 and 43.  Her legal clerk got the test wrong.  It’s for lawful purposes.  She also spends significant time exploring whether, in her opinion, the “unprecedented societal concern” associated with ARs.  So she does the balancing test associated with tiers of scrutiny that Bruen specifically disallowed.

And while we’re at it, the very section of Heller she quoted above dealt with handguns because ownership of long guns was already accepted, while handguns were disallowed.  The supreme court wasn’t stipulating what firearms may be owned.

Finally, this literally ignorant prose.

Unlike the broader category of handguns at issue in Heller and Bruen, the record developed here demonstrates that assault weapons and LCMs are suboptimal for self-defense.

So the old battle ax is now an expert in self defense!

Tell her Stephen Bayezes says hello.

This will be overturned, or remanded for reconsideration in light of whatever case they take up (perhaps the Illinois case).

UPDATE: Mark Smith provides a quick analysis.