Calguns Foundation Wants SCOTUS review of CA 10-day waiting period

Will the Ninth Circus be reversed yet again? . . . U.S. Supreme Court Urged to Reverse 9th Circuit Gun Control Ruling

Today, plaintiffs in a long-running Second Amendment lawsuit challenging the State of California’s 10-day “waiting period laws” for firearm transfers have filed a brief at the United States Supreme Court urging the Justices to take up the case or issue a summary reversal of the 9th Circuit’s decision.

The case, captioned Jeff Silvester, et al. v. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, seeks to overturn a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision and clarify the standards that all lower courts should use when reviewing Second Amendment lawsuits. Since the Supreme Court’s landmark McDonald v. Chicago decision, state and federal courts throughout the country have used wildly different approaches in scrutinizing laws that burden or eliminate the right to keep and bear arms.

The Plaintiffs and Petitioners’ reply brief, authored by Supreme Court and appellate attorney Erik. S. Jaffe of Washington, D.C., opens by pulling no punches: “After a waiver, a [call for response], and an extension of time, the [State’s] Brief in Opposition illustrates perfectly the contempt into which the Ninth Circuit has brought this Court’s precedents. A candid response would have confessed error and moved on. The response filed by the California Attorney General instead demonstrates a near complete lack of concern for precedent, procedure, or the risk of correction by this Court.”

It’s almost as if the Ninth Circuit really doesn’t care about the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald precedents. But their recent refusal to review the Maryland “assault weapons” ban, may signal a reluctance to touch any Second Amendment cases as the court is currently constituted.

 

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16 COMMENTS

  1. It’s the “cooling off period” bs that gets me. No reason I should be subjected to it, considering I already own more than one firearm.

  2. The SCOTUS is sitting pat waiting for one or more relics to retire one way or another. If RBG accidentally is exposed to sunlight we may see an opening.

    • +1

      Would it be uncouth to start a betting pool about which U.S. Supreme Court Justice exits the court first?

    • The trouble is, no one expected Scalia to exit the court before Kennedy or Ginsburg. Now my fear is that another conservative justice exits the court before another conservative justice joins the court. I would feel much better if two more young conservative justices join the court.

      • Given what passes for conservative these days, I don’t want any more of them on the Court. Given me someone like Judge John Roll, who was killed in the Gabby Giffords attack: he was a rabid supporter of all enumerated rights, not just a few.

  3. Watch the libbies squirm if someone mentioned proposed legislation for “Mandatory 10 day waiting and review period for all internet comments, emails and messages” to maintain they do not contain any hate-speech.

    Not gonna happen but it’s in the same anti-liberty vein.

    • As anti-speech as they are, I could see them going for that, though. They love blocking comment sections and rioting at anything remotely resembling a right-leaning event.

    • That may not be the perfect analogy, but it’s the correct approach. The best way to evaluate any infringements on the Second Amendment is to frame the same infringement in context of the First. Pick your clause…

      Imagine a 10 day waiting period to:

      Attend a church service.
      Write a Letter to the Editor.
      Post to a blog.
      Attend a Trump protest (that’ll really get them fired up!)
      Organize a protest at at public park.
      Etc.

  4. Am I the only one who thinks the Calguns Foundation’s logo looks like it should belong to a golf/country club somewhere?
    🤠

  5. A lawyer friend thinks it’s far more likely they’ll take this case than any which raises a new issue, because what the appeal is really about is getting lower courts to behave according to existing rulings. I see his point; I can’t think that SCOTUS likes its decisions to be mocked any more than anyone else.

  6. The best feature of Silvester, in terms of the probability of having a petition for certiorari granted, is not the 10 day waiting period, but instead the fact that, despite the Supreme Court’s express rejection of a “sliding scale” of analysis of 2A rights, that is exactly what some courts have done, while others have a far stricter level of scrutiny. There seems to be general agreement (in the absence of Supreme Court authority) tht “intermediate scrutiny” applies to cases not involving guns in the home, but what passes for “intermediate scrutiny” is essentially nothing more that the lowest level of scrutiny, “rational basis” review. In this case for example, the trial court made extensive findings of fact on the evidence submitted at trial, all of which were, contrary to the usual rules on appeal, summarily rejected by the Ninth Circuit, which then supplanted the trial court rulings with its own. Moreover, until this case, there was no evidence in the legislative record that the waiting period was enacted as some sort of cooling off period–this was an invention of the Attorney General as a means of supporting, on public policy grounds, a waiting period that was enacted to allow the state sufficient time to perform a background check. In many cases, particularly with concealed weapons carriers and persons with collector’s licenses, almost instantaneous, and not terribly long for persons who already own guns. To say nothing of the fact that a “cooling off period” is irrelevant if one owns guns already.
    Another case using a questionable standard of review, among quite a few, was the Highland Park AR case, in which the Seventh Circuit, on literally no evidence at all, upheld an AR ban on the basis that the law might make people “feel safer.” There is no hint of “intermediate scrutiny” in such decisions.

    Establishing a standard of review in 2A cases is critical in stemming the continued attacks by the 2d, 3d, 4th and 9th Circuits on our constitutional rights, and for this reason alone, the court should take the case.

  7. Ca wants us FFL3 holders to get a C.O.E. from them, it is expensive and requires fingerprinting every 2 years. Then and only then can we get our C&R weapons that we buy in state out of the FFL1 the same day. The only advantage to a C&R license is that we can buy in other states and bring back our C&R purchases as long as we file with the state in a short number of days

  8. Not much longer until the Left pollys decide we need a cooling off period for speech, cause, muh hatespeech bs. Nonsense state, nonsense politics, nonsense.

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