CA:Constitutional Challenge to Handgun Roster goes Forward

Yesterday, oral arguments were held for our Second Amendment challenge to California handgun “roster” laws (that limit access to Constitutionally-protected handguns by law-abiding people) before United States District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller on cross motions for summary judgment. The lawsuit, Ivan Peña et. al v. Stephen Lindley (Wilfredo Cid was previously named as defendant), was filed by The Calguns Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation, and a number of individual plaintiffs in April 2009, during the period that Nordyke v. King incorporated the Second Amendment through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

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The Court moved on to ask both sides to assume that intermediate scrutiny applied and explore the constitutional violation. Counsel for Peña reminded the Court that the test need not be scrutiny-based since it was not in D.C. v. Heller. The Court continued to explore scrutiny with both sides and was particularly interested in California’s microstamping requirement – she wanted to know if the violation was only temporary. Of course, even a temporary violation of a fundamental right remains nothing less than a violation of the Constitution. In testing California’s theory, California argued that even under intermediate scrutiny, the State could give everyone a handgun and mandate it is the only gun you could use for self-defense in the home….and that would be enough. The Court seemed troubled by the logical extension of California’s argument that only one handgun was enough to allow the full and unencumbered exercise of Second Amendment rights. Peña counsel made it clear that the Constitutional analysis the State wanted to implement would logically allow them to restrict all handguns by caliber to only .22lr, or even to ban all handguns and only allow Tasers — an argument the District of Columbia made and lost on in Heller.

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 We expect we’ll see an opinion on the cross motions in the next 90 to 180 days.

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