The Ninth Circus Court three judge panel has again displayed its dislike for the rights of The People by staying the district courts preliminary injunction against the state.

The District Court found that the plaintiffs(good guys) were likely to succeed on the merits and had all the other requirements to be granted a preliminary injunction. In order to keep things from yo-yoing the court put a 14 day stay in order for the state to appeal to the Ninth Circus Court.

The preliminary injunction is stayed as to the chamber load indicator and magazine disconnect mechanism requirements of California’s Unsafe Handgun Act. — Order of the Ninth Circuit Court

The Ninth Circus Court is ordering opening brief by April 28, 2023 (bad guys). Answering brief by May 26, 2023 from the good guys. And the reply from the bad guys within 21 days of the answering brief being filed.

This means that the Ninth Circus will not hear the case until at least June, likely longer. In the meantime only the microstamp requirement is enjoined.

It was suggested by it’s just Boris that a founding era firearm safety requirement could be used to support the California Roster system. In particular, they suggested that proof testing would be a close enough match.

It isn’t. Proofing a firearm is entirely different from the idea of requiring or forbidding features.

The original proofing was done to make sure that guns did not blow up in your face. Because of the metallurgy of the time it was not a good idea to trust a pressure vessel until it had been tested. To this end “proofing” was required.

Emphasis added.

What is very important about the requirement for “proofing”, from a Second Amendment view, is that no class of arm, “pattern” was outright banned.

What was happening is that a level of third party quality control was being performed, by the government.

At times the proofing wasn’t done a the royal proofing houses but was instead done at the manufacturer’s location.

With the California roster, the concept is that if California doesn’t like the weapon it is banned. Not that the weapon has to perform as designed and not blow up.

In addition, while proofing was required in Europe, I can find no regulations that actually require the proofing of firearms from 1790-1799. I used both Google and Duke Center for Firearms Law. It is likely that with a bit more work I could find something at Duke but the real proof is that the state has not made the argument in any of the cases I’ve read.

The GFZ admin had a short discussion and decided that we do want to add links for those organizations that are fighting for the Second Amendment. To that end, if you have a favorite organization let us know in the comments.

There have been a number of cases that are making progress, I’ll continue to bring updates as I get them or I find new cases.

Hagar has a couple of new articles out and J.Kb and Miguel keep cranking them out.

In the next week I’m going to do an article on PACER and RECAP. PACER is where you buy court documents. RECAP is a site that collection PACER documents for others to use. I’m looking at being able to put out a call for our readers to add documents from PACER to RECAP. Since you get $30 dollars worth of PACER documents per bill period free, this might work well for us.

We are going to be doing some site work later this week as it is time for a WordPress update. This will cause a brief outage.

Anything else you want to tell us about, feel free in the comments.

B.L.U.F. In a strategic move the State of California is appealing to the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals in the “Unsafe Handgun Act” case. The district judge found the UHA unconstitutional by requiring Chamber Load Indicator(CLI), Magazine Disconnect Mechanism (MDM), and microstamping. The state is appealing the CLI and MDM but NOT microstamping.

US District Court Judge for the Central District of California, Judge Cormac J. Carney, came to the right decision but his analysis to get there was and is weak. This has lead to the likelihood of this appeal being granted. It was likely to be granted by the Ninth Circuit Court because the en banc court hasn’t seen an infringement they didn’t support.

The Ninth Circuit court is so anti-gun that when a three judge panel found in favor of the plaintiffs(good guys) in Duncan v. Bonta the Second Amendment community was shocked. One of the judges on that panel wrote an opinion explaining exactly how the en banc court was going to find for the state infringements.

In Boland v. Bonta the judge did not find that the UHA was a ban, instead he found that requiring CDL, MDM, and microsamping created a de facto ban which made that part of the UHA unconstitutional.

Consider a regulation that says “You are not allowed to have any firearm with a barleycorn front sight”. This reads like a ban because it is a ban. Now consider a regulation that says “You are only allowed to have firearms with barleycorn front sights.” This is also a ban. It just doesn’t read as clearly as the first.

Now consider a regulation that says “You are only allowed to have firearms that are on this approved list.” That sounds sort of like a ban but maybe not. If the list is comprehensive to the point where you can buy whatever you want it doesn’t feel like a ban. In order to even have standing to challenge the ban you would have to prove to the court that you wanted to purchase a firearm not on the list and had attempted to do so.

Now what if we add another part to the regulation “only firearms with barleycorn front sights can be placed on the list.” This has exactly the same effect as “You are only allowed to have firearms with barleycorn front sights.” It is a ban. If the state changes the list of firearms that it allows, it is still a ban.

This is how the state of California bans handguns. They just don’t put modern handguns on the rooster and thus ban them from the State of California.

The Question

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Enjoy a win!

NC legislature overrides Gov. Cooper’s veto, pistol purchase permits repealed

Supporters of the bill said the pistol purchase permit system is redundant since federal background checks are already required and many of the checks in place are what the state requires. The state law does go further than federal law does and allows a sheriff to deny a pistol permit if they determ…

B.L.U.F. District Court of Delaware Judge Richard Gibson Andrews decided on 2023-03-27 that a ban on some firearms and some magazines was constitutional in denying a preliminary injunction.
Slight updates to correct spelling and Judge’s name.
Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, Inc v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security (1:22-cv-00951)

Prior to Bruen the courts used a two step analysis that first determined if the regulation touched on the core right of the Second Amendment, self-defense. If it did then they then used a means-end balancing act where they considered just how much infringing was being done (just how much rape was done to you Mrs Jones? If it wasn’t too much rape then it really isn’t a big case and we don’t need to prosecute him as a felon.)

Once the courts had determined there was infringement and had established just homehow much that infringement harmed the individuales core civil rights it used a balancing act against the public need as defined by the state. Thus if the state said that the regulation was going to make the public safer that would be balanced against just how much the individual was effected. The individual almost always lost this game.

Post Bruen there are still two steps, the first step is determine whether ‘the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct’ — Memorandum Opinion at P.6 quoting Bruen. If the answer is yes, then the burden shifts to the state to show a history and tradition of analogous regulation from the time of the founding.

If it is an arm then the individual’s conduct is presumptively protected by the Second Amendment.

In order to win the case, the state has to prove only one of the following:
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The post WWII trials saw many many of the accused murders claim that they were “just following orders”. There was always somebody higher up that ordered them to murder people.

What isn’t as well known is that the population, when asked “Why didn’t you try and stop these mass murders?”, replied with “We didn’t know.”

The US military has rules that say you should not follow an illegal order.