Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
On Monday, the long-running debate over gun laws is moving to center stage, out in San Francisco.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments concerning whether an unusual gun law passed by voters in Sunnyvale, Calif., late last year is constitutional.
A coalition of gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, claims the law, which bans anyone from owning gun magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds, violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Sunnyvale, on the other hand, claims the law does not impinge on Sunnyvale residents’ Second Amendment rights to own a firearm within the home for self-defense because such “large-capacity magazines” are “neither necessary nor even useful for self-defense because defenders seldom fire more than two shots.” Restricting such magazines makes sense, Sunnyvale argues, because they’re frequently used in mass shootings, including the massacre at Newtown, Conn., at the end of 2012.
So who is right?
A U.S. District Judge in San Jose, Calif., in March upheld the law, finding that while the Sunnyvale law “implicated” the Second Amendment, the burden placed by the law on a Sunnyvale resident’s Second Amendment rights “is relatively light.”
Wrote Judge Ronald M. Whyte:
The Sunnyvale law passes intermediate scrutiny, as the court—without making a determination as to the law’s likely efficacy—credits Sunnyvale’s voluminous evidence that the ordinance is substantially tailored to the compelling government interest of public safety.
Still, the caselaw concerning firearm restrictions has been developing for a relatively short period of time. In June 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark case called District of Columbia v. Heller, ruled that the Second Amendment protects one’s right to own a firearm in one’s own home.
But the court left for another day (and, until then, lower courts) a variety of issues, including whether and to what degree firearms can be carried outside the home, and the degree to which semi-automatic weapons can be regulated as well. The law on these issues is not well settled, meaning the judges of the Ninth Circuit have leeway in the Sunnyvale case to chart their own path.
The stakes could be high, writes Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News:
[O]ther California cities, including Mountain View, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have moved to adopt similar regulations. And given that the 9th Circuit shapes law for nine western states, its Sunnyvale ruling is likely to have a much broader reach
. . .
Cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles have warned the 9th Circuit that overturning Sunnyvale’s Measure C would invalidate their campaigns to control gun violence.
But to gun-rights groups, such efforts to curtail gun ownership are unconstitutional anyway.
“In American history, magazine prohibition has been a rarity,” said the Gun Owners of California, according to the Mercury-News. “Sunnyvale’s (law) has no support in American legal history.”