The article that prompted this:
I read the article. I am not seeing how a high capacity magazine makes you more safe and is constitutionally protected.
Obviously the court said so but I’m missing how their argument works.
I am curious, how many people have defended themselves from bad people only because they had more bullets in their magazine?
According to both your article and the CNN article, California’s law made half of all the magazines in the United States illegal in the Eureka state. And CNN includes a little more detail on the majority position, which is that the ammunition is “typically used for lawful purposes, and are not ‘unusual arms’ that would fall outside the scope of the Second Amendment.” i.e. Those magazines are protected by the 2nd Amendment according to this decision.
Perhaps they would have ruled differently had the law banned magazines with a capacity over 30 rounds. Those are somewhat unusual in my experience and maybe they wouldn’t be protected.
Does that matter?
President Trump made 100% of all bump-stocks illegal. If you had one you had to destroy it or turn it in. The Supreme Court passed on hearing the case.
So, why does that matter how many units it affects?
I don’t have a particular dog in that race as I had no interest in owning a bump stock and I do not know whether or not they were in common use. However, I was not keen on the president of the United States making something illegal by fiat even if I’m ultimately indifferent to the outcome in this particular case.
However, in recent years the Supreme Court has ruled that the right to own a firearm for the purpose of self-defense is an individual right. This comes up in District of Columbia vs. Heller where residents challenged laws that banned all handguns save for those registered before 1975 and required rifles and shotguns to be stored unloaded and disassembled or with a trigger lock rendering them next to useless for self-defense. So the court overturned that law on the grounds that owning firearms for self-defense was a Constitutional right. And while the court maintained that there was not an unlimited right to own anything firearm related, it also stated that that the right applies to firearms commonly used by the militia. i.e. Those in common use for legal purposes.
I’m not an attorney, though I’ve watched plenty of Law & Order, so I can’t give you a good explanation like a real lawyer could. But it follows that if one has a right to own a firearm for self-defense then that includes access to magazines, ammunition, scopes, etc., etc. California arbitrarily declared anything over 10 rounds to be a high capacity magazine at a time when 15+ was pretty standard. i.e. In common use for lawful purposes.
Do you think that having firearms with 10-round magazines in them ever makes people more safe? I suspect that in your case, the answer would be “no”. But if you concede that having a firearm with a 10-round magazine in it does in some circumstances make people more safe–that is, that having guns sometimes gives people the opportunity to defend themselves against illegal and violent attacks that immediately threaten them with death or grievous bodily harm–then it’s hard to see how you can say that a magazine that holds 15 rounds or 19 rounds instead of 10 rounds is not thereby that much more useful in self-defense; and also is so much more dangerous than a gun with a 10-round magazine that it must be banned, even for law-abiding people with clean records.
We are not talking about the difference between pistols and hand grenades or surface-to-air missiles. If someone can’t be trusted with a gun with a 15-round magazine in it, they can’t be trusted with a gun with a 10-round magazine, either. If they can be trusted with a gun with a 10-round magazine, then they can be trusted with a gun with a 15-round magazine or a 20-round magazine.
I believe that the more important part would be the bit about how the firearms, when configured with the type of magazines for which they were designed, are “typically used for lawful purposes, and are not ‘unusual arms’”, rather than the numbers of units.
Given that for instance a 9mm Browning HP pistol was already designed with a 13-round magazine c. 1930 and the AR-15 with a 20 round magazine c. 1960, ISTM it was the restricting the capacity to less that needed to be justified, not the allowing more than 10. Now, say you said you wanted to ban 50 or 100 round drum mags… who knows, that may have stood.
OTOH bump stocks are not something for which the firearm was designed and their use was, well, intrinsecally “unusual” (and IMO unsafe and kind of daft anyway). And yes, it sounds like the “I know it when I see it” standard for porn, but just that’s what we’ve got to work with right now.
One thing to note, the thing that made the judge uneasy- was that this was not a ban on sale of such magazines- but a ban on possession.
Many standard run of the mill guns come with such magazines, and this law made them all illegal.
Certainly the constitutional issues are largest here in this particular case. 2A as currently interpreted gives wide latitude to the right to keep weapons, and only limited scope to limit them.
Yes. And the real problem is that:
a) We have no way to reliably distinguish a priori between the people who can be trusted with those things (whether high capacity magazines or ordinary pistols) and people who can’t be trusted with those things.
b) Per current 2A jurisprudence, the government is on very thin ice trying to implement anything aimed at the folks who can’t be trusted with them once they’ve been identified.
while
c) A bunch of very real harm is done by those untrustworthy people we can’t legally separate from their ability to do harm.
resulting in
d) The want (need?) for trustworthy people to arm themselves since the government is practically prohibited from effectively protecting them from the untrustworthy ones. Which in turn crates a vast supply of weapons, ammo, etc., which can be diverted to the untrustworthy.
In all it’s a mess. Which isn’t going away forever.
I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration of the current state of Second Amendment jurisprudence. I haven’t heard anyone even trying to seriously challenge existing federal disqualifications, which include felons, anyone who has ever been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, anyone who’s ever been convicted of even misdemeanor domestic violence, and a few other categories. I also don’t know of anyone mounting any serious challenge to current federal law which requires NICS checks on all firearms sales made by someone with a Federal Firearms License. There are certainly “loopholes” in the current system (hence the widespread support for universal background checks), but the government doesn’t seem to be on very “thin ice” when it comes to at least trying to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, people who have been formally judged to be dangerous on account of mental health issues, and so forth.
More than that, they’re a clear and obvious attempt to circumvent existing legislation requiring specific licensing for fully automatic weapons. That, I suspect is what got them banned more than anything else.
But larger capacity magazines aren’t an attempt to circumvent any laws- in most cases, they’re just a box with a spring that holds more rounds. In some cases, like most 9mm handguns, they’re designed to use a 15 round magazine, as that’s one of the attractions of 9mm is the ability to hold more rounds in a typical pistol-sized magazine. 10 round magazines usually require more trouble than a 15, in that they have to block off the bottom space for 5 rounds somehow.
For rifles, it really depends on the particular rifle. AR-15 type rifles generally have 20 or 30 round magazines as standard, with 30 rounds being the usual military size due to reliability reasons. Other rifles have smaller magazines as standard- the Ruger 10/22 comes with 10 round magazines as standard (or did, anyway).