My governor has now signed two gun regulation bills that rely on citizen lawsuits for enforcement:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that he has signed a bill allowing private citizens to sue companies including gun manufacturers for violating the state’s firearms regulations.
It is one of a pair of bills passed by the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature that use civil liability to target the gun industry. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has said he would sign the other proposal, which allows individuals to sue to enforce bans on certain types of weapons.
This is, of course, the tactic that Texas used against abortion back when it was still a constitutional right protected by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court ruled that this was just hunky dory even though it was obvious from the start that it was little more than pathetically juvenile game playing from the Texas legislature.
But conservatives on the Court gave it an emergency green light anyway because they knew it wouldn't matter. No one would ever get a chance to argue against them at a full hearing since they were about to kill Roe v. Wade and make the whole thing moot.
So what will they do this time around? What California has done is plainly ridiculous, but conservatives on the Supreme Court have already ruled that it's OK. Will they stick to their guns even though the subject is now guns, which they like, instead of abortion, which they don't? Or will they stroke their chins and come up with some kind of sophistry to explain why California has done something slightly different from Texas and therefore they have to overturn our shiny new law?
I don't really care much about the laws in question, which are unlikely to have much effect. But I am absolutely mesmerized about what the Supreme Court is going to do.
Stay tuned.
We already know the Supreme Court will rule against California.
Using the 2nd Amendment & Originalism, arguing that where the Constitution doesn't have the word abortion, or even woman, pregnancy, & child, guns are an explicitly enumerated right & cannot be infringed.
The sad part, even if the new California regulation comes to form, I suspect it will not materially change the number of gun deaths. Data is a bit foggy (or perhaps wrong) but assault style weapons are less than 5% of gun deaths.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Assault-style rifles may be responsible for a relatively small number of overall gun deaths, but they're disprorportionately responsible for most of the mass shootings in recent decades.
Gun nuts are fixated on AR-15's because they are a symbol of their cult. And since they do have large magazines they are usually best for mass killings. But if they were not available those who are bent on mass killings could easily use other types of guns, including hand guns ("automatics"). Other guns have been used in many mass killings.
Here’s data that says the assault weapons ban reduced mass shootings deaths: https://theconversation.com/did-the-assault-weapons-ban-of-1994-bring-down-mass-shootings-heres-what-the-data-tells-us-184430
Now here’s the rest of the causal chain: Mass shootings make headlines, and also cause a sharp uptick in advocacy of gun control. Fear of shooters + fear that ‘the gummint gonna take our gunz’ spikes purchases of guns. More fear + more guns -> more deaths and injuries from accidental discharges or guns left where kids find them or mishandling or guns drawn in bar fights and domestic quarrels; also, more gun suicides …
Part of the Great Circular Jerk of conservative thought.
Works that way for any topic,
having no idea what you're talking about > imagining things > imagination limited to your hand mirror > vivid assumptions > hysteria > clinging to the security of certainty > authoritative confidence >[cycle restarts] > having no idea what you're talking about > conspiracy theories > what you can imagine doing if you were 'them' > need to act > paralyzed by incompetence > certainty of the Second Amendment > you are the authority > [cycle restarts] > having no idea what you're talking about > dogmatic assertions, Qanon, militias . . . .
Charles Whitman, like the day the music died, was a long, long time ago...
but they're disproportionately responsible for most of the mass shootings in recent decades.
Right, but the point is, most gun murder victims in America are not killed in mass shootings. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests such events account for perhaps 5% of the total.
Yes, but they are fearsome occurrences that strike almost randomly, unlike most other shooting deaths that involve people who know each other.
In this way they are comparable to airplane crashes, which - even decades ago when they were relatively common - don't kill very many people overall. Yet we still act decisively to reduce that number towards zero because of the fear they induce.
Removing the AR-15s would be a much bigger win than it might appear from the number of deaths. It would establish our right as a society to make and enforce such decisions. Not a complete solution but a significant step in taking that worry from being out in public.
I'm not for a second arguing we shouldn't ban assault rifles. We should. Indeed, we should go way beyond that (at minimum, national implementation of the Massachusetts gun regulations system). I'm a hardcore gun control advocate.
But I am suggesting banning assault rifles won't lower gun murders very much. And I also worry that the intense focus on military-style weapons gives the public a false sense of what needs to be done: for the USA to reduce gun violence to the point where it approaches that in other high income countries, we actually need to do what those other high income countries do. And they do a lot more than simply ban military-style long guns.
Agree complety on the goal. The question is political:
Would banning assault rifles lead to people thinking:
(a) "that didn't solve the problem, gun control is useless"
Or
(b) “we beat the gun lobby, this not impossible, let’s do it again “
Pretty much every ruling coming from the Alito/Thomas court is plainly ridiculous so why not play the same game.
Sadly, the Supremes will deep-six this without even breaking a sweat. They could declare that the Texas SB 8 ruling was good for one ride only, like Bush v Gore. They could announce a new rule that the Court will give unenumerated rights, like privacy, short shrift, but enumerated rights, like the 2nd Amendment, will get deluxe concierge service. Or something else entirely. If it’s outcome first and rationale after, anything goes.
None of this would have anything to do with the actual reasoning of the SB 8 majority opinion, which had to do with federal jurisdiction and standing, not the nature of the constitutional rights ash-canned by the statute at issue, but they don’t need to be consistent or even logical. Textualism, history and traditions, blah blah blah, the statute is enjoined. They won’t even need a prayer meeting for this one.
Sigh. So much simpler.
No injunction, then rule against the first law suit filed based on the law.
No hypocrisy, no inconsistency.
The Court’s response will likely center on the Second Amendment being explicit and so different from the anti-abortion ruling.
I think you are correct though exactly what is explicit in the Second Amendment is not so clear to most of us. For much of our history it did not mean an unrestrained individual right to have any type of weapon and the whole well regulated militia thing did not gets treated as if it were a meaningless preface.
I would be quite curious to learn what the current crop of justices interpret that “well regulated” bit to mean.
“well regulated” means keeping peaceful protestors away from Morton's.
In a just world, Brett Kavanaugh would never eat any better than Carmine's: a Place for Steaks.
They claim the "well-regulated" part was included by the framers merely to provide an example (of many potential reasons) of why gun rights are desirable; but that this example should not be interpreted as a limiting factor.
I think they're full of shit. But that's what they say.
The Supreme Court will issue a *slightly* more high-falutin' version of this:
It is prima facie ridiculous for the state to use private actors to deny citizens their Constitutional rights. What.. that's inconsistent with our earlier ruling? Tough [spit], libtards!
SCOTUS can just say the CA law is preempted by The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. Congress passed a law to block civil lawsuits against the gun industry. 15 Senate Democrats voted for it.
Incluso el hereo progresista, lo mas inteligente lider de la gran reforma norteamericana, El Santo Socialista de Monteverde.
I mean, the point of this is not so much to win, and/or advance policy. The point is to make the Supreme Court look ridiculous. Which in the grand scheme of things, is not a good place to be, but the current Court doesn't need a lot of help to look ridiculous.
I would carve out a bit of an exception for the Chief, who seems to get that certain things make the Court look ridiculous, but he's kind of a cipher.
Older people lose their inhibitions. I seriously worry that Coca-Cola Short n' Curly will make a comeback when Ketanji Brown Jackson is ensconced among the Supremes. & even sexual harassment in front of Shakes Roberts's eyes won't lead him to want Clarence Thomas gone.
My guess is that the Supreme Court will be consistent, and will refuse to issue any sort of injunction against enforcement, but at the same time will declare unequivocally that these laws violate both the Second Amendment and the Protection of Lawful Commerce act, which will give gun manufacturers the security they need to continue doing business.
i'm glad california did it. i look forward to the scotus ruling. but i have zero uncertainty on where the conservative majority will land. they don't care about consistency. you think alito's losing sleep thinking "oh noes! we hypocrisied!"
+1
I vote for "sophistry." Maybe the court will lean on the good old "standing" excuse. Maybe they'll worm it out via the shadow docket.
The damage done to this country by that former guy (the LOSER) and his compliant, complicit Republican Party is just overwhelming. No more trust in elections. Political violence is a-okay. The courts are totally political institutions. If you don't want to be shot dead on the street, you've got to lug a gun with you everywhere you go. Too bad about your kids. And on, and on.
More likely the appeals court will firstly issue injunctions preventing enforcement and later rule the laws unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decline to take an appeal without giving any reasons.
Yeah, Thomas , Alito and the gang should have little trouble distinguishing this case from the Texas abortion case. Maybe some late medieval misogynistic but flintlock loving witch hunter has some enlightening words--that are an integral part of our nations' tradition of rights, natch--that makes it all very clear. In any case, the corrupt and out of control SCOTUS majority no longer has the least amount of shame and really doesn't try much any more (except maybe Roberts, who is pretty much all in with the other five Republicans ideologically but still trying to preserve a fig leaf of legitimacy for the Court) to disguise that their opinions do not represent good faith legal analysis but risible gobbledygook cobbled together to justify ideological and nakedly political judgements arrived at even before they even granted cert in the particular case.
+1
Hah! I'm glad California did this. I think blue state legislatures should jam the Supremes by passing all sorts of new laws the court will have to rule on. And they should refuse to honor unsigned shadow docket decisions as illegitimate.
I'd also like to see legislatures go originalist on the court by explicitly allowing unrestricted possession and carry of flintlocks and muskets (the arms known at the time the second amendment was drafted) and tightly regulating everything else.
Good for you ... with this court we'll get all sorts of horrible precedents from your preferred approach. Precedents that may take decades to unwind.
Does precedent matter where Roe was overturned, & soon enough Obergefell*, Loving, & Griswold?
*Wonder how Justin Kennedy's Dad will feel about his former Supreme understudy Kavanaugh writing JKD's crowning glory put of existence.
If the Supreme Court that rules on a dispute involving California's gun regulations/laws is the same as it is today, there is absolutely no doubt how they will rule. California's gun regulations are unconstitutional from their perspective because they aren't consistent with the history of gun regulations in this country. All a gun manufacture has to do if sued by a resident of California is claim that the law is unconstitutional and this Court will rule in their favor.
Per Ian Millhiser:
In effect, an arbitrary Court is telling Americans that, the law is what we say it is, not what is written in the Constitution. This potential showdown highlights the hypocrisy, but conservatives of late have not cared about hypocrisy -- see Trump. Rather, I think this Court would rather further invalidate itself on the expectation that liberals don't have it in them to do something about it. See: Roe overturned.
As Democracy declines, you have to ask yourself, "do I really care?"
I don't think most Russians care about whether they live under a Putin, a Trump, or a [insert Chinese dictator's name here], so long as they can make a living. In that same theme, I think most Americans are fine with whatever form of government is presented, so long as one can make a living. If the threat isn't existential and immediate, it is probably not that important to most people.
I hope Rob Portman lives long enough to see his son gassed in a Hawley-Gabbard Regime concentration camp.
I think most Americans are fine with whatever form of government is presented, so long as one can make a living.
Definitely.
I used to take the attitude: "In a democracy people get the government they deserve."
But I've come around to the view that this simply doesn't square with reality. Most people are truly clueless about public policy and/or indifferent to what they view as abstractions.
Thus, while democracy is still the best form for any polity, it only works well when there are competent, public-spirited leaders at hand. There really is no substitute for enlightened leadership.
"Or will they stroke their chins and come up with some kind of sophistry to explain why California has done something slightly different from Texas"
History and tradition, Kevin.