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The upside is if California goes full retard on this while we have a solid pro-constitution majority in SCOTUS, we should get a whole bunch of iron clad precedents that will serve us well for decades or more.
This is an interesting point. The CA law that is being challenged was voted in before Trump was in office and everyone was sure Hillary would win. They were equally sure the NRA would challenge the law. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the supreme bench was not even imaginable back then. I think that if they had known this in 2016 the law would not have been put on a ballot. The moment Kennedy made his announcement I thought every anti-constitutionalist in the US was given pause for fear of their cause making it to SCOTUS, and not just the 2A.
Random thoughts...
This was just a 3 judge panel, not the 9th en banc.
The 9th constantly makes drunken rulings they know will be overturned. They don't care as they know SCOTUS can't catch all of them
The dissenting judge (John Wallace) was born in 1928... The wording of his dissent is maybe the best example of legislating from the bench I have ever seen.
Wallace wrote that the confiscation law could be upheld based on some statistics supplied by one of Michael Bloomberg's organizations. Yet the district court had specifically explained why those statistics lacked reliability and credibility: they were "incomplete studies from unreliable sources upon which experts base speculative explanation and predictions."
The 5th Amendment challenge is insane. That anyone on the planet agrees with the idea that one is not being deprived of property because they can just move is out of state is not grounded in this world, IMHO
All the 9th did did was allow the district court to hear the case and make a ruling the full Circuit court can overturn. CA may petition the full circuit for an en banc hearing. The 9th Circuit is very hostile to the 2A en banc. Then we may be off to SCOTUS several months forward where, God willing, Kavanaugh will be be waiting. Recall that in Heller Kavanaugh's dissent was, in part, that MSRs were in common use. Well, so are magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds. CA would get crushed.
Personally, I find Heller to be weak in that it falls short of the intended purpose of the 2A and that it may actually preclude newly evolved weaponry from being available to the public. We need an NFA challenge to surface.