Tag: 2nd amendment

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Strikes Down California’s Ban on Open Carry – Trump Judge Issues Scathing Opinion

A US Appeals Court on Friday in a 2-1 decision struck down a California law banning people from openly carrying firearms.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cited a 2022 Supreme Court ruling and said California’s ban on open carry is unconstitutional.

US Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion and blasted the state of California for banning open carry for 95% of its population.

California banned open carry on all counties with populations greater than 200,000 – which is 95% of the state.

In 2019, Mark Baid filed a lawsuit against the California Attorney General challenging the state’s ban on open carry.

Judge VanDyke, a known gun enthusiast, said California’ ban on open carry is unconstitutional.

“For most of American history, open carry has been the default manner of lawful carry for firearms. It remains the norm across the country—more than thirty states generally allow open carry to this day, including states with significant urban populations,” VanDyke wrote.

VanDyke said many states allow open carry and California has a history of open carry.

“Similarly, for the first 162 years of its history open carry was a largely unremarkable part of daily life in California. From 1850, when California first became a state, until the Mulford Act of 1967, public carry of firearms in California (open or concealed) was entirely unregulated. And when California first deviated (or considered deviating) from this practice, its reasons for doing so were less than morally exemplary,” VanDyke wrote.

“In our Nation’s history and tradition, open carry was widely recognized as being central to the Second Amendment right,” VanDyke added. “A ban on that which is at the core of the Second Amendment is not a ‘minimal burden’ on the Second Amendment right.”

Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld California’s ban on large-capacity magazines.

The en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit Court (a decision from the court’s entire slate of judges) sided with California’s radical Marxist Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who grew up in Bozeman, Montana, angered a lefty judge on the court after he released a highly unusual video dissent demonstrating him handling several different firearms.

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Everytown’s Defense of ‘Vampire Rule’ Renders the Second Amendment Meaningless

In less than a month from now, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Wolford v. Lopez, the challenge to Hawaii’s default ban on concealed carry on all private property (also known as the “vampire rule”, thanks to FPC’s Rob Romano) unless property owners specifically allow it. Amicus briefs in support of both the plaintiffs and defendants have now been filed with the Court, and over the next couple of days we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the arguments raised in defense of the gun control law… starting with the amicus brief filed by Everytown for Gun Safety. 

What makes this brief noteworthy is the audacity of the gun control group’s arguments, which fly in the face of the Court’s decisions in Heller, McDonald, and Bruen and would essentially turn the Second Amendment into a dead letter if adopted by the justices. 

The first argument raised by Everytown is that laws that are specifically designed to frustrate Second Amendment rights are presumptively constitutional, and that an “improper purpose” for a gun control statute is not reason enough for the courts to strike it down. 

This Court’s decisions in Bruen and Rahimi set forth the operative analytical framework for Second Amendment challenges. When a contemporary law regulates conduct that falls within the Amendment’s text, this framework points courts to historical evidence to determine whether the law is consistent with tradition. The United States and petitioners now ask the Court to distort that methodology by arguing for per se invalidation of any regulations that “restrict[] firearms simply to frustrate the exercise of Second Amendment rights”—a description they incorrectly ascribe to Hawai‘i’s statutory scheme. And they incorrectly claim that their freefloating improper-purpose test is grounded in the textual and historical understanding of the Second Amendment. Because neither precedent, text, nor history supports that novel test, the Court should reject it.

Now, it’s true that the Supreme Court has said that courts need to look to the text of the Second Amendment as well as the national tradition of gun ownership to determine if a modern gun control law is 2A-compliant, but there’s a good reason why the justices have never explicitly said that laws meant to chill the exercise of our right to keep and bear arms are unconstitutional: it’s self-evident. 

Rights exist for a reason, and any laws that are put in place with an eye towards curtailing that right are, by their very nature, constitutionally unsound. And despite Everytown’s claim to the contrary, Hawaii’s “vampire rule” is absolutely meant to stop people from exercising their right to bear arms. If it’s illegal to carry a gun in the vast majority of publicly accessible places, even with a concealed carry permit, then most people aren’t going to bother getting one… and those that do will be unable to carry except in a very limited number of locations. 

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Trump’s DOJ Sues Washington, D.C. Police Department Over Unconstitutional Ban on Semi-Automatic Firearms

The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department for enforcing a ban on semi-automatic firearms in violation of the Second Amendment.

The lawsuit alleges that D.C.’s gun laws require registration of all firearms with the MPD; however, the D.C. Code imposes a sweeping ban on numerous protected weapons, making it legally impossible for residents to own them for self-defense or other lawful purposes.

The DOJ said in a press release announcing the lawsuit:

“MPD’s current pattern and practice of refusing to register protected firearms is forcing residents to sue to protect their rights and to risk facing wrongful arrest for lawfully possessing protected firearms.”

“Today’s action from the Department of Justice’s new Second Amendment Section underscores our ironclad commitment to protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

Bondi continued, “Washington, DC’s ban on some of America’s most popular firearms is an unconstitutional infringement on the Second Amendment — living in our nation’s capital should not preclude law-abiding citizens from exercising their fundamental constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

Echoing this sentiment, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division added, “This Civil Rights Division will defend American citizens from unconstitutional restrictions of commonly used firearms, in violation of their Second Amendment rights. The newly established Second Amendment Section filed this lawsuit to ensure that the very rights D.C. resident Mr. Heller secured 17 years ago are enforced today — and that all law-abiding citizens seeking to own protected firearms for lawful purposes may do so.”

The case draws directly from the landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, where the Court affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding citizens to own semi-automatic weapons in their homes for self-defense.

Back in 2003, D.C. special policeman Richard Heller challenged the District’s handgun ban, leading to this pivotal ruling. Yet, nearly two decades later, D.C. continues to enforce similar unconstitutional restrictions, resulting in wrongful arrests and denials of basic rights.

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Tim Walz Goes It Alone: Uses Executive Orders for Gun Control After Legislature Rejects His Push

Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed executive orders Tuesday expanding Minnesota’s red flag law and creating a “Statewide Safety Council” intended to prevent “mass violence” and “targeted attacks.”

Walz’s gun control executive orders come after the state legislature refused to pass gun control measures he pushed after the August 27, 2025, Minneapolis Catholic school attack, in which a transgender man who had been identifying as a woman opened fire during mass.

According to KSTP, Walz said:

These actions today don’t limit your freedoms at all. Being shot dead in your school certainly does. … There’s no one fix to this, but there are certainly things that we know, there are certain things we’ve learned globally that make a difference, and these two actions will be another step in that direction.

Walz did not mention that the Catholic school attacker used three guns–a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun–and that he bought all three guns legally, which means he complied with the left’s gun controls on acquisition.

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North Carolina Woman’s Lawsuit Gives SCOTUS a Chance to Establish National Reciprocity

In January 2021, Eva Marie Gardner was driving in Montgomery County, Maryland when her car was allegedly hit by an assailant who ran her off the road before exiting his vehicle and rushing towards her. Gardner says she first screamed at him to get away, but when he continued advancing she drew her pistol in self-defense, though she never fired a shot. 

When police arrived on scene, they ended up releasing the man who allegedly ran her off the road, but arrested Gardner for illegal possession of a firearm. Gardner, who now lives in North Carolina, had a valid concealed carry permit from Virginia, but Maryland doesn’t recognize carry permits from any other state and she was ultimately convicted despite raising a Second Amendment claim. 

Gardner appealed all the way to the Maryland Supreme Court without success, and in mid-October she took her case to the Supreme Court, filing a cert petition on her own behalf that asks the Court to decide several questions, including whether “Maryland’s prohibition on carrying a handgun without a state permit, as applied to an interstate traveler with a valid Virginia concealed carry permit who displayed a loaded firearm in self-defense against an assailant’s vehicular assault and physical advance, violate the Second Amendment under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, by lacking a historical tradition of disarming law-abiding citizens in such circumstances.”

Gardner also brings a claim under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that Maryland’s refusal to recognize out-of-state permits violates the Constitution and conflicts with the Firearms Owners Protection Act.

Ordinarily, a pro se petition has little chance of being granted cert by the Supreme Court, with one study finding just 84 cases since 1945. The good news for Gardner is that at least one justice has taken an interest in the case. After Maryland waived its right to respond to her cert petition, the Court requested the state provide one, and Maryland’s reply brief is now due on January 26, 2026. 

Second Amendment Foundation Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros has discovered another new detail that could up the odds of SCOTUS hearing Gardner’s case next year. 

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John Lott Fires Back at Critics of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Defending 2A

Saying that gun rights are civil rights shouldn’t be controversial. After all, most of what we term as civil liberties are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, from freedom of speech and religion to protection against illegal search and seizure, and many others. The Second Amendment is smack dab in the middle of all of those. Saying the right to keep and bear arms is a civil right isn’t controversial; it’s obvious.

But some people can’t seem to wrap their gray matter around that.

Among them are some critics of the Department of Justice actually treating gun rights like civil rights, and John Lott has some words for those folks.

“The Civil Rights Division’s new focus on the Second Amendment, which is far outside its longstanding mission, is moving us even further away from our nation’s commitment to protecting all Americans’ civil rights,” said Stacey Young, a former division attorney who resigned shortly after the current administration took office.

The investigation into Los Angeles’ reluctance to grant concealed-carry permits has already drawn sharp criticism. “This is a gross misuse of the government’s civil rights enforcement authority,” said Christy Lopez, who served as deputy chief of the division under the Obama administration.

But poor black Americans — who face the highest risk of violent crime — gain the most from having the ability to protect themselves.

For women, the safest response when confronted by a criminal is to have a gun. Women who rely on passive behavior are 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury than women who use a firearm to defend themselves. Because criminals are overwhelmingly men, a woman attacked by a man faces a much larger strength imbalance than a man attacked by another man. A gun dramatically shifts that balance. It increases a woman’s ability to protect herself far more than it does for a man.

Background Check Errors Mostly Affect Blacks, Hispanics

Consider something as seemingly uncontroversial as background checks for gun purchases. Gun-control advocates often claim that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has stopped 5.1 million dangerous or prohibited people from buying guns since 1998. But more than 99 percent of these denials are false positives, and the errors fall disproportionately on law-abiding black and Hispanic men.

The impact of gun laws in general falls disproportionately on black and Hispanic men, even. And, in a world where people see disparity of outcomes as proof of racism, then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate all gun control laws.

Granted, I’m not someone who ascribes to that personally. I think it can be evidence of racism, but it’s not always. At least not directly, anyway.

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Byrna Files Lawsuit Against CA for Blocking Ammunition Sales of Less-Lethal Weapons

Bryan Ganz is the founder of Byrna, the less-lethal self-defense weapons, which looks like handguns but shoot powerful chemical irritants rather than lethal bullets, designed to immobilize an attacker air intruder. The weapons are legal in all 50 states. But, in California, Ganz told the Globe that the state blocked sales of Byrna’s ammunition and launchers.

Why? We thought a less-lethal weapon (some say it’s non-lethal) would be a wildly popular option, and hailed by California’s Attorney General and law enforcement. The Byrna uses a pepper-gel projectile, like a pepper spray, rather than bullets.

But it’s complicated, the Gun Zone explains, thanks to California’s highly regulated gun control laws. “Because it doesn’t discharge a projectile ‘by means of an explosive,’ as defined by California Penal Code section 16520, it technically falls outside the strict definition of a firearm. However, this doesn’t automatically grant free rein. California law, particularly when dealing with weapons designed for defense, is highly regulated.”

And it’s further complicated by brazen gun control and anti-police politics.

In 2021, California passed Assembly Bill 48 by then-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, which outlawed “the use of kinetic energy projectiles or chemical agents by any law enforcement agency to disperse any assembly, protest, or demonstration, except in compliance with specified standards set by the bill, and would prohibit their use solely due to a violation of an imposed curfew, verbal threat, or noncompliance with a law enforcement directive.”

In 2021, with the well-funded George Floyd protests across the country, police  were confronted with violent riots and protesters, and forced to use crowd control measures. Assemblywoman Gonzalez claimed that her bill was in response to the unwarranted force used by law enforcement against protestors, journalists and others in the George Floyd protests. She objected to the injuries caused by rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, foam rounds, and other projectiles, the Globe reported in 2021.

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Federal Appeals Court Deems Gun Ban For Marijuana Consumers Unconstitutional, Dismissing Conviction

A federal court has tossed a firearms conviction against a man because it determined that the underlying alleged crime—possession of a gun while being a user of marijuana—is unconstitutional.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District on Friday said the crux of the case is “whether the Second Amendment protects a habitual marijuana user from being permanently dispossessed of a firearm based on our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The ruling comes as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of the federal ban on gun ownership by people who use marijuana and other drugs. Numerous federal courts have issued rulings on the issue in recent years, but the legal challenge has yet to be settled.

The case of Kevin LaMarcus Mitchell is somewhat unique, in that the appeals court made an assessment about the cannabis and firearms question in the context of a ruling to invalidate a conviction for general unlawful gun possession.

What the court ultimately determined is that the federal statute § 922(g)(3) doesn’t meet the standards of Supreme Court precedent in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which held that gun laws restricting the Second Amendment must be set in a way that’s consistent with the country’s founding.

The appeals court found that there was no “sufficient evidence of present intoxication” when Mitchell was prosecuted, and so “admission of being a habitual marijuana user is not enough to justify § 922(g)(1)’s permanent ban on his firearm possession.”

“The implication of a ruling to the contrary would be that Michell was always intoxicated from age nineteen onward based on his admission, and our historical laws could be applied to him at any point during that period,” the majority ruling said.

“Accordingly, we REVERSE the district court’s denial of Mitchell’s motion to dismiss and VACATE the judgment of conviction and sentence,” it said. “The government’s motion to supplement the record is DENIED as moot.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently granted a request from the Trump administration to extend the deadline to submit briefs in a case concerning the constitutionality of the federal gun ban on gun ownership for cannabis users.

After justices agreed to take the case, U.S. v. Hemani, last month, DOJ told the court there was mutual agreement between its attorneys and those representing the respondent in the case that the initial deadline for briefs and reply briefs should be revised because of the “press of other cases.”

Relatedly, a coalition of gun rights organizations recently urged the Supreme Court to expand its examination of the constitutionality of the federal firearm ban for cannabis consumers—telling justices that a recent case on the issue it accepted would not properly settle the question of the current law’s constitutionality.

With respect to Hemani, in a separate August filing for the case, the Justice Department also emphasized that “the question presented is the subject of a multi-sided and growing circuit conflict.” In seeking the court’s grant of cert, the solicitor general also noted that the defendant is a joint American and Pakistani citizen with alleged ties to Iranian entities hostile to the U.S., putting him the FBI’s radar.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up Hemani, if justices declare 922(g)(3) constitutional, such a ruling could could mean government wins in the remaining cases. The high court last month denied a petition for cert in U.S. v. Cooper, while leaving pending decisions on U.S. v. Daniels and U.S. v. Sam.

The court also recently denied a petition for cert in another gun and marijuana case, U.S. v. Baxter, but that wasn’t especially surprising as both DOJ and the defendants advised against further pursing the matter after a lower court reinstated his conviction for being an unlawful user of a controlled substance in possession of a firearm.

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Senior citizen who saved himself from would-be mugger is heading to prison because of NYC’s ‘draconian’ laws

A Queens senior citizen who shot dead a man who tried to rob him will spend four years in prison after admitting to toting an unlicensed revolver — as his lawyer ripped the city’s “draconian” gun laws.

Charles Foehner, 67, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal weapons possession Thursday in a deal to end his case more than two years after he fatally shot would-be thief Cody Gonzalez, who charged at him near his Kew Gardens home.

The Queens District Attorney’s Office chose not to prosecute Foehner, a retired doorman, for Gonzalez’s killing after he told cops that he’d defended himself from a mugger who lunged at him late at night holding what looked like a knife — but which turned out to be a pen.

But prosecutors slapped Foehner with a slew of weapons raps for the unlicensed handgun and for an arsenal of illicit handguns, revolvers and rifles inside his home in the quiet neighborhood.

Foehner took the plea deal to avoid a trial, where he faced 25 years in prison on gun charges that are not hard to prove, said his attorney Thomas Kenniff after Thursday’s hearing in Queens Supreme Court.

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Giffords: Increase in Defensive Gun Uses ‘Must Be Stopped’

When I covered the WSJ’s hit piece on Stand Your Ground laws on Wednesday, I wondered if the reporters had any behind-the-scenes help from gun control activists. 

It’s not proof of anything, but since the story appeared online only one gun control group has promoted the story on X or Bluesk

The premise of the WSJ story is that Stand Your Ground laws have led to a 59% increase in the number of justifiable homicides in some states between 2019 and 2024, and that the law is allowing some folks to literally get away with murder. 

As we discussed yesterday, though, none of the anecdotal cases cited by WSJ in support of that premise are slam dunk examples of murders that were deemed justified as a result of SYG laws. The data set used by the paper is also suspect, since it did not include the significant number of states where Stand Your Ground exists in common law but not specifically in statute. 

There are only 11 states that impose a general duty to retreat before acting in self-defense. The vast majority of states don’t require you to present your back as a target to your attacker while you try to run away; instead, they allow you to act in self-defense so long as you have a reasonable belief of imminent death or great bodily harm. 

Stand Your Ground laws also aren’t really a new thing. Florida’s statute, for instance, has been in place for two decades. If the law automatically led to more unjustified shootings being deemed justifiable homicides by the courts, we would have expected to see that phenomenon occur long before 2020, but there’s no evidence that’s the case. 

We saw a huge spike in violent crime in 2020, along with a big spike in new gun owners. That’s the most likely reason for an increase in justifiable homicides since then; with more crimes being committed and more people carrying for self-defense, there are more occasions when legally armed citizens will use a firearm to defend themselves. That doesn’t mean, however, that people are getting away with murder just because they tell police that they were in fear for their lives. Every time a life is taken a police investigation is going to take place, and charges may very well be filed even when there’s evidence of self-defense. 

Even using the WSJ’s own flawed dataset, the percentage of homicides deemed justified in SYG states has climbed from about 2.8% in 2019 to 3.8% in 2024. We don’t know how many self-defense claims were raised in the 96.2% of homicides that were deemed murder, but we know the number isn’t “zero.” Stand Your Ground laws aren’t a “get-out-of-jail free” card for armed citizens, despite the slanted reporting from the WSJ and Gifffords’ wild suggestion that many or all of these justifiable homicides are actually murder.

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