Justices Send Assault Weapon, Magazine Bans Back to Lower Courts
BY Herschel Smith
2 years, 5 months ago
BREAKING: SCOTUS overturns mag bans, assault weapons ban, and carry ban," Go back and redo in light of what we said in Bruen." This means: The 9th Circuit now has to apply text, history, and tradition to those anti-gun laws. pic.twitter.com/LazvjbePQH
— National Association for Gun Rights (@NatlGunRights) June 30, 2022
Several challenges to state gun laws were sent back to lower courts in light of the US Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling limiting restrictions on firearm possession outside the home.
Known as a “GVR”—for grant, vacate, and remand—the justices often allow lower courts another shot at cases after a high court decision that could potentially change the analysis or outcome of a case.
The cases sent back Thursday include challenges to bans in New Jersey and California on high-capacity magazines that hold ten rounds or more, Maryland’s assault weapons ban, and Hawaii’s restrictions on open-carry.
In each case, the lower courts had upheld the restrictions.
The justices didn’t explain why they sent the cases back, but presumably it was to apply the new test laid out by Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in New York State & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The ruling was the Supreme Court’s first major Second Amendment case in over a decade and limited the restrictions that states can place on where gun owners can take their firearms.
Courts should look only to the constitutional text and that nation’s history of gun restrictions in determining whether a state has run afoul of the Second Amendment, Thomas wrote, adding that they should not defer to legislative determinations about whether gun restrictions are necessary for public health and safety.
“While that judicial deference to legislative interest balancing is understandable—and, elsewhere, appropriate—it is not deference that the Constitution demands here,” Thomas said.
I talked with Dave Hardy a day or two ago and asked about the status of Young v. Hawaii. He thought it would be vacated and remanded to be consistent with the findings in Bruen.
These are all the right decisions, and everybody knows it.
I hope Young is handled soon and Hawaii has to begin the process of issuing permits. Actually, I wish they would legalize open carry, consistent with the what the founders did and how they lived their lives.
But leave it to the controllers in Hawaii. They apparently want to require that permit holders go through the same qualification that LEOs do.
The upshot is that most LEOs aren’t as good with their weapons as most permit holders I know (including me).
On June 30, 2022 at 4:30 pm, Fred said:
This is big, but, in the places in question the right has no enforcement mechanism. They are lefty hotbeds so enforcement of gun control they’ll do, but enforcement of liberty?
On June 30, 2022 at 4:47 pm, Miles said:
“But leave it to the controllers in Hawaii. They apparently want to require that permit holders go through the same qualification that LEOs do.”
Justice Thomas addressed such in the Bruen decision. at the end of Footnote 9:
“…because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait
times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary
citizens their right to public carry.
Those wait times and exorbitant fees are not exclusive examples of ‘abuse’.
“Lawsuits galore….”
On July 4, 2022 at 11:02 am, PeanutButter said:
Fred, removing that enforcement balance was one of the reasons why county-based defense units were defunded in 1916 by Congress. One can’t have any real domestic resistance to the imperial Presidency and Woodrow Wilson’s idealism.
I’ve advocated for years for a re-established Militia system to not only provide a defense unit function based solely on citizen participation, but also establish the needed ancillary functions of such an organized system: a UCMJ-like regulatory aspect, as well as investigative units tasked to root out unconstitutional challenges to its mission.
Congress would have to pass legislation enabling a new special Art. III court system to handle the cases coming from these enforcement actions. Along with the other modern laws needed to give “well-regulated” a meaning consistent with what the Founding Fathers wanted with these non-federal units.
But a much stronger official and legal counterbalance to existing enforcement organizations such as the DOJ and federal enforcement agencies is sorely needed, since the Deep State has (deliberately) dropped the ball on almost every aspects of defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.