Media asking if California’s gun laws will survive

The Bruen decision opened a door. The door is one where many gun control laws in this country, particularly in states like California, will get kicked out of, never to be heard again. The decision laid down a pretty strict test for such laws–did such a law exist at the time of the founding? If not, then it doesn’t survive the text and history standard laid out.

Now, the media is apparently recognizing the possibility

California’s requirement requiring proper cause for people to obtain a concealed weapons permit might not be the last of the Golden State’s gun laws rendered unenforceable by a United States Supreme Court with an expansive view of the Second Amendment, one legal expert says.

Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law and the author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” told Nexstar’s KRON that the court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen to overturn that state’s proper cause requirement “clearly affected California in a couple of ways.”

“California has a very similar kind of concealed carry policy as New York,” Winkler said. “The California Attorney General has already issued guidance to law enforcement in California to discount the application of proper cause for concealed carry permits. The second way is that the Supreme Court has in the New York case articulated a new test for Second Amendment cases when gun laws are challenged, and that new test is going to be hard for some of California’s gun laws to survive.”

These include laws such as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which Winkler said “could be struck down in the years to come.”

Of course, this is amazing news for our friends in California and in other states with a similar lack of regard for people’s Second Amendment rights.

The truth is, those should be struck down.

See, in California, the push has literally been to prohibit gun ownership by civilians. For example, people there can only buy certain handguns; weapons on a particular list of weapons approved by the state. Yet getting approval is an arduous process that most manufacturers aren’t interested in replicating for every new model.

As a result, the options for guns available continue to dwindle, creating a slow-motion handgun ban in the state, all without actually having to ban handguns.

But there’s no historical precedent for such an effort, which means that based on Bruen, there’s absolutely no way this would survive a legal challenge. I’m just waiting for someone with the appropriate standing to file a lawsuit challenging the law.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what all may soon fall in the Golden State. California has an assault weapon ban, a magazine restriction, and other anti-Second Amendment regulations too numerous to delve into. All of them now come under threat from the Bruen decision.

Frankly, it’s glorious.

This is especially amazing in the wake of Greenwood Park, where an armed citizen put an end to a mass shooting and, in the process, shattered numerous anti-gun myths.  In other words, this is a great time for pro-gun advocates despite anti-gun efforts pushed by congressional Democrats. After all, those won’t survive legal challenges either.

California isn’t likely to become a pro-gun state anytime soon. However, they might start looking like one whether than want to or not. If they do, then other anti-gun states will as well, and whether they like it or not, the results will still be something we can all live with.