{"id":94916,"date":"2023-08-03T19:38:23","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T00:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=94916"},"modified":"2023-08-03T19:38:23","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T00:38:23","slug":"94916","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=94916","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Federal judge bizarrely contends that most firearms can be banned without violating the Second Amendment<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton\u00a0tossed out a lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0challenging Connecticut\u2019s ban on concealed carry in state parks, ruling that the plaintiff in the litigation didn\u2019t have standing to sue because there was no credible threat of him being arrested or prosecuted for violating the ban. That was an exceedingly odd decision, but it kept the ban in place (at least for now), which counts as a win as far as anti-gunners are concerned.<\/p>\n

Now Arterton has followed up with another legal doozy, rejecting a preliminary injunction against the state\u2019s newly-expanded ban on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines by declaring that the Supreme Court\u2019s Second Amendment jurisprudence allows for bans on commonly-owned weapons, and that \u201conly a ban on firearms that are so pervasively used for self-defense that to ban them would \u2018infringe,\u2019 or destroy, the right to self-defense\u201d would violate our right to keep and bear arms.<\/p>\n

Under Arterton\u2019s\u00a0interpretation<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Heller<\/em>,\u00a0McDonald<\/em>,\u00a0Caetano<\/em>, and\u00a0Bruen\u00a0<\/em>everything from bolt-action hunting rifles to single-barreled shotguns could be banned without calling into question the right to keep and bear arms; presumably leaving only some (but likely not all) handguns protected by the Second Amendment\u2019s language.<\/p>\n

Unlike the broader category of handguns at issue in Heller and Bruen, the record developed here demonstrates that assault weapons and LCMs are suboptimal for self-defense. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A set of statutes that bans only a subset of each category of firearms that possess new and dangerous characteristics that make them susceptible to abuse by nonlaw abiding citizens wielding them for unlawful purposes imposes a comparable burden to the regulations on Bowie knives, percussion cap pistols, and other dangerous or concealed weapons, particularly when \u201cthere remain more than one thousand firearms that Connecticut residents can purchase for responsible and lawful uses like self-defense, home defense, and other lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well hang on there. If, according to Arterton, only those arms that are \u201cpervasively\u201d used in self-defense cannot be banned, then firearms most commonly used for lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting have no protection whatsoever under the Second Amendment, regardless of whether or not the state of Connecticut still allows them to be sold.<\/p>\n

You can read Arterton\u2019s lengthy dissertation for yourself\u00a0here<\/a>, but I\u2019ll caution you before you start that her opinion reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to W.C. Fields; if you can\u2019t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullsh**. Arterton definitely left me scratching my head on multiple occasions, such as her rejection of the use of FBI crime statistics that point to rifles of any kind being rarely used in homicide because the data supposedly \u201cprovides limited relevant insight\u201d since they \u201cthese statistics do not track what types of firearms are used with enough precision to determine whether they are assault weapons.\u201d Arterton, meanwhile, blithely took the state\u2019s \u201cexpert\u201d John Donohue of Stanford University at face value, though Donohue has maintained that the individual right to keep and bear arms was created by the Supreme Court in\u00a0Heller\u00a0<\/em>and was not a pre-existing right protected by the Second Amendment in 1791.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There was another head-scratching moment of sloppiness or disregard for the facts when Arterton cited a 1994 case known as\u00a0Staples v. United States<\/em>. Plaintiffs contended that the case showed a distinction between military-grade M16s and semi-automatic AR-15s, but Arterton bizarrely claimed that\u00a0Staples\u00a0<\/em>\u201cdoes not mention AR-15s\u201d; a point easily disputed by the Firearms Policy Coalition (see second tweet below).<\/p>\n

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The judge declined to adopt the state's position that magazines holding more than 10 rounds aren't "arms": pic.twitter.com\/0TavMKw6ug<\/a><\/p>\n

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) August 3, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n