Ninth Circuit Court blows a hole in gun control

H2 Note: This is an HISTORIC TRIUMPH for liberty and the preservation of our Constitution and way of life. The SOCIALIST majority of Californians lose - WE WIN! California is the test bed for all things socialist, anti-family, anti-God. We've seen them try to steal our values and Constitutional Rights from us over and over and over again.

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Human Events
By: John Hayward
2/14/2014

Ninth Circuit Court blows a hole in gun control

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The ban on openly carrying guns made it impossible for most law-abiding citizens in counties like San Diego to “bear arms” for self-defense, O’Scannlain said in Thursday’s ruling. He said the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to “bear arms” must include the right to carry weapons outside the home.

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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, aka the “Ninth Circus,” is hardly a bastion of judicial conservatism. That makes its decision striking down California gun-control laws all the more earthshaking. As is often the case with landmark court rulings, the story is far from over – there is some more wrangling to be done in the Ninth Circuit before the scene shifts to the Supreme Court, which is likely to intervene due to conflicts with other circuit court rulings. The next step will probably be a full court review of the 2-1 ruling from this three-judge panel.

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Perhaps we will come to view Thursday’s ruling as the beginning of the end of the gun-control movement as we have known it in the United States. If this decision holds all the way through the Supreme Court, some core tenets of that movement will soundly defeated for a very long time to come. For the moment, as SFGate reports, we have a challenge to a county ordinance that’s already blossomed into the evisceration of California’s permit system:

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California must allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms in public, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday, striking down the core of the state’s permit system for handguns.

In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said San Diego County violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment by requiring residents to show “good cause” – and not merely the desire to protect themselves – to obtain a concealed-weapons permit.

State law requires applicants to demonstrate good cause, as well as good moral character, to carry concealed handguns, while leaving the permit process up to each city and county. The ruling, if it stands, would require local governments to issue permits to anyone of good moral character who wants to carry a concealed gun for self-protection.

“The right to bear arms includes the right to carry an operable firearm outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense,” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain said in the majority opinion.

As SFGate notes, this ruling disagrees with opinions from courts in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, but agrees with one from Illinois, so it seems highly likely that the Supreme Court will step in. After decades of agonizing debate, the political class may finally be forced to acknowledge that the Second Amendment says what it says. What if this is the beginning of a legal avalanche that obliges politicians to admit the rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights exist, too? What a strange new world we might end up living in.

The Ninth Circuit decision is positively brimming with common sense:

California has long had some of the nation’s strongest restrictions on gun ownership, and, according to the court, is one of only eight states that allow local governments to deny concealed-weapons permits. The state formerly allowed residents to carry unloaded firearms in public, with ammunition in a separate container, but repealed that law at the start of 2013.

The ban on openly carrying guns made it impossible for most law-abiding citizens in counties like San Diego to “bear arms” for self-defense, O’Scannlain said in Thursday’s ruling. He said the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to “bear arms” must include the right to carry weapons outside the home.

The risk of armed confrontation “is not limited to the home,” O’Scannlain said. He invoked the situations of “a woman toting a small handgun in her purse as she walks through a dangerous neighborhood, or a night-shift worker carrying a handgun in his coat as he travels to and from his job site.”

C.D. Michel, lawyer for the National Rifle and Pistol Foundation and individuals who challenged the San Diego County system, said sheriffs in many rural California counties already comply with the court’s standard by issuing gun permits to anyone who wants one for self-defense. But urban counties require evidence of a special need for a weapon, the requirement that the court invalidated, he said.

“The right to self-defense doesn’t end at your threshold,” Michel said. He said the ruling is “probably the biggest Second Amendment win” since the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling and a follow-up decision in 2010.

Oh my Gawd, he’s right, people do get attacked outside their homes! It seems so obvious now. The truth of the right to keep and bear arms was staring us in the face the whole time! There is even a passage in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that points out “the right to keep and bear arms” directly endorses carrying loaded and ready firearms around, because that is that is the meaning of the verb “bear.” That must be why the Second Amendment doesn’t protect “the right to store guns in your closet!”

Another major issue in this ruling was whether citizens could be forced to jump through hoops and prove they had a compelling need to exercise their Second Amendment rights. The citizen was expected to demonstrate a “unique risk of harm” – for example, serious physical menace from a stalker – in order to secure a concealed-carry permit. The primary plaintiffs in the case were people whose applications for concealed-carry licenses were denied because they couldn’t give the authorities a good enough reason for wanting one. (People usually get weeks of advance notice before they’re attacked by criminals, right?)

The court correctly sees this as an unreasonable infringement upon the right to keep and bear arms. I would submit such requirements are the antithesis of an inalienable right. It’s not “inalienable” if you have to beg the government to let you exercise it; the citizen is placed on defense in a power relationship where the State was meant to be submissive. Once we accept that core rights are negotiable, the negotiations don’t end until the right in question has shriveled away to nothing.

Restricting the access of known criminals to guns is one thing, but the California laws went too far towards treating every citizen as a criminal unless he could conjure a compelling and immediate reason to be treated better by the authorities. Overweening state and federal bureaucracies hold that “everyone is a criminal until proven otherwise” mindset far too often. It’s a natural consequence of the growth of government power.

Another tactic of left-wing jurisdictions that came in for a beating in the California decision was the tendency to set hurdles so high that exercise of a constitutional right became largely theoretical. In this case, the court said it was impermissible to ban both concealed and open carry. Economist John Lott, a prominent critic of gun control measures, notes that the hurdles in California are so high that only political cronyism is likely to secure a concealed-carry permit:

Ironically, California may have opened the door to make it much easier for people to get concealed handgun permits by recently banning people from openly carrying guns. The court wrote that while it might indeed be constitutional for a state to ban concealed handguns or to ban people openly carrying handguns, it simply can’t ban both options.
Counties such as Los Angeles have only let a few hundredhttp://global.fncstatic.com/static/v...ernal-link.png people get concealed handgun permits out of 7.5 millionhttp://global.fncstatic.com/static/v...ernal-link.png adults. In San Diegohttp://global.fncstatic.com/static/v...ernal-link.png, only about 700 out of 2.4 million can carry. And in San Francisco, no one is granted a permit to carry a gun.

In Los Angeles and Orange Counties, the few lucky people getting permits are big donors to a sheriff’s re-election campaign or a sheriff’s personal friend. In other counties, such as Stanislaus County in northern California, the key to getting a permit seems to be eitheran influential politician or a prominent businessman.

There are over 11 million concealed handgun permits nationally.Yet, the right to defend oneself in California has largely been limited to the very well-to-do and to the politically powerful.

Behold the liberal utopia: only the Ruling Class is legally allowed to carry guns, leaving everyone else at the mercy of well-armed criminals as the streets run red with blood.

As Lott notes, even if the Ninth Circuit ruling stands and causes a nationwide Second Amendment earthquake when it hits the Supreme Court, gun-control zealots will continue attacking the right to keep and bear arms by imposing ostensibly less onerous requirements that have the practical effect of making guns nearly impossible for law-abiding citizens to obtain, or make firearms incredibly expensive, so that only the Ruling Class can legally afford them.

But the core principles of the gun-control movement are being destroyed, hard on the heels of a disastrous political year for them, in which they failed to rally significant public support behind their cause despite media-fueled exploitation of horrible crimes. When you take away the gun-control planks broken by these recent court rulings, what’s left except a relatively minor debate over the precise details of licensing? Who is a louder and more persistent voice for reasonable gun safety than the NRA? ”Shall-issue” carry laws enjoy overwhelming support from police officers (Lott pegs it at 91 percent currently.)

Those who actually know something about the realities of self-defense are lined up against the gun control movement, which stands revealed as the most dangerous incarnation of “gesture liberalism,” the tendency to support laws and programs that express ideological preferences and “good intentions” at the expense of individual rights and common sense.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/02/1...n-gun-control/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6erya...ature=youtu.be

Monday, 17 February 2014 11:00

Liberal Ninth Circuit Court Upholds Concealed Carry

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First, Heller clarifies that the keeping and bearing of arms is, and has always been, an individual right.

Second, the right is, and has always been, oriented to the end of self-defense.
Any contrary interpretation of the right, whether propounded in 1791 or just last week, is [in] error.

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Written by Bob Adelmann

The decision rendered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals February 13 resulted in gasps of dismay from gun control advocates and cheers of delight from Second Amendment supporters. In writing for the 2-1 majority in the case of Peruta v. County of San Diego, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, in his 70-page opinion, said:

We are called upon to decide whether a responsible, law-abiding citizen has a right under the Second Amendment to carry a firearm in public for self-defense….

Because the Second Amendment has always been an individual right to defend oneself ... states may not destroy the right to bear arms in public under the guise of regulating it.

At issue was the requirement, enforced by the San Diego County Sheriff William Gore, that an applicant for a concealed weapons permit must demonstrate “good moral character,” must complete a specified training course, and establish sufficiently “good cause” for the sheriff to issue the permit. The judge noted that the state law the sheriff was enforcing required him to evaluate “good cause” on a case-by-case basis looking particularly at “situations related to personal protection … [but concern for] one’s personal safety alone is not considered good cause.”

The requirements are onerous: An applicant has to provide documentation supporting and elaborating on their good cause, such as restraining orders, letters from law enforcement agencies and other sources proving that he had a sufficiently pressing need for self-protection, proving to the sheriff’s satisfaction that these are “circumstances that distinguish [him] from the mainstream,” according to the law. In other words, the sheriff was under no pressure or requirement to issue concealed carry permits, and so, except in rare circumstances, he didn’t.

This frustrated the plaintiffs in the case, Edward Peruta, Michelle Laxson, James Dodd, Leslie Bucher, and Mark Clearly, who were either denied concealed carry permits or simply decided not to apply in the first place, knowing that their applications most likely wouldn’t be approved. They were joined by the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation (CRPAF) and the National Rifle Association (NRA), which helped fund the attorneys prosecuting the suit. The complaint was simple: Peruta was being denied his freedom guaranteed under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms for the purposes of self-defense because the “good cause” requirement kept him from doing so.

O’Scannlain relied heavily on the Heller and McDonald cases already decided by the Supreme Court in 2008 and 2010 respectively, noting that Heller in particular “codified a pre-existing, individual right to keep and bear arms and that the “central component of the right” is self-defense. He then noted that McDonald completed the loop that such a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment applied not only to the federal government but to the states as well under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In his analysis, O’Scannlain did something remarkable: He sought to determine the “originalness” or the original intent of the Founders. For his argument he relied on the Heller case in which the Supreme Court held that "Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad." The judge didn’t try to twist meanings or shade definitions or ignore or belittle opinions expressed by dead white males 200 years ago. Instead, he wrote:

The Second Amendment secures the right not only to “keep” arms but also to “bear” them — the verb whose original meaning is key in this case.

Saving us the trouble of pulling the eighteenth-century dictionaries ourselves, the [Supreme] Court already has supplied the word’s plain meaning: “At the time of the founding, as now, to “bear” meant to “carry.”

Yet, not “carry” in the ordinary sense of convey[ing] or transport[ing] an object, as one might carry groceries to the check-out counter or garments to the Laundromat, but “carry for a particular purpose — confrontation.”

He no doubt delighted in quoting Justice Ginsburg, who accurately and properly defined the word “bear” in another case, as meaning to “wear, bear, or carry ... upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose ... of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in case of conflict with another person.”

he judge confirmed that he was following the thinking, the determination, and the intent of the Founders, looking, as he put it, “to the original public understanding of the Second Amendment right as evidence of its scope and meaning.” He even quoted Sir William Blackstone from his Commentaries, which are generally regarded as the definitive pre-Revolutionary source of common law that informed the Founders:

Blackstone noted in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that the “right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence” [sic] had its roots in the “natural right of resistance and self-preservation.”

Concluded O’Scannlain:

With Heller on the books, the Second Amendment’s original meaning is now settled in at least two relevant respects.

First, Heller clarifies that the keeping and bearing of arms is, and has always been, an individual right.

Second, the right is, and has always been, oriented to the end of self-defense.
Any contrary interpretation of the right, whether propounded in 1791 or just last week, is [in] error.

The NRA was ecstatic:

In a tremendous victory for the right to keep and bear arms, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to carry firearms for self-defense in public….

Peruta is the first appellate decision to hold that licenses to carry cannot be denied to law-abiding citizens just because they do not have a special need to carry.

Bob Egelko, writing for SFGate, was distressed by the ruling and took pains to quote at length the dissent of Justice Sidney Thomas in the ruling, including repeating the canard that more guns will equal more crime: “Courts and state legislatures have long recognized the danger to public safety of allowing unregulated, concealed weapons to be carried in public.”


Egelko then quoted an attorney who agreed with Thomas, regurgitating the same line in slightly different terms:


The majority of peace officers killed in the line of duty are killed by guns. If you have a domestic violence incident and a gun is available, it’s more likely to be used. It increases the harm to law enforcement and to the public.


The best that can be said is that Peruta is one minor albeit successful skirmish in the long war against gun rights. The immediate call by San Diego County to have the decision reviewed by an 11-judge panel will delay implementation of O’Scannlain’s decision. And however that review turns out, the case is likely headed to the Supreme Court for further clarification. So to say that this decision is the “beginning of the end of the gun-control movement as we have known it in the United States” as expressed in a fit of exaggerated exuberance at Human Events is overly optimistic.


What cannot be denied, however, is that this decision is not only carefully and deliberately crafted to receive favorable treatment when it does arrive at the Supreme Court, but it was decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, generally regarded to be the most liberal of any in the country.


This no doubt is causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who still think — and want the rest of the citizenry to think — that the Second Amendment has to do only with duck hunting and state militias and nothing to do with individual rights to self-defense.

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-conceal-carry

Court overturns restrictions on concealed guns in much of California

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"But the Second Amendment does require that the states permit some form of carry for self-defense outside the home."

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Appeals panel finds state rules allowing counties to restrict the right to carry concealed weapons in public violate the 2nd Amendment.

By Maura Dolan and Tony Perry February 13, 2014, 9:10 p.m.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a significant victory for gun owners, a divided federal appeals court Thursday struck down California rules that permit counties to restrict as they see fit the right to carry a concealed weapon in public.

The 2-1 ruling by a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel would overturn restrictions on carrying concealed handguns, primarily affecting California's most populated regions, including Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco.

The majority said the restrictions violate the 2nd Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms because they deny law-abiding citizens the ability to carry weapons in public unless they show they need the protection for specific reasons.

"We are not holding that the Second Amendment requires the states to permit concealed carry," Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, a Reagan appointee, wrote for the panel. "But the Second Amendment does require that the states permit some form of carry for self-defense outside the home."

The decision was hailed by gun rights advocates, who said citizens must have the right to protect themselves in public. Proponents of stricter gun control described the ruling as an aberrant and reckless expansion of law that would lead to more gun violence.

California's rules will remain in effect for the foreseeable future, pending appeals. Officials in San Diego County said they may seek a rehearing before a larger 9th Circuit panel, and experts said the issue would eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thursday's decision stems from a change in state law in 2012 that took away the right of residents to carry unloaded guns in public, with ammunition toted separately. Before the ban was enacted, courts routinely upheld restrictions on carrying concealed weapons. Gun owners argued that the ban and restrictions on concealed weapons made it impossible to defend themselves in public.

California leaves it to counties to decide permit requirements for carrying concealed weapons in public, and the rules in the state's urban centers are more restrictive than in other areas.

Gun owners who were denied permits by San Diego County sued, charging their federal constitutional rights had been denied. Although they were trained in gun use and had met background checks, they could not cite specific reasons why they needed the weapons.

"Given this requirement, the `typical' responsible, law-abiding citizen in San Diego County cannot bear arms in public for self-defense," wrote O'Scannlain, who was joined by Judge Consuelo Callahan, an appointee of former President George W. Bush.

The ruling, by two of the 9th Circuit's most conservative judges, conflicted with holdings in most other circuits and established gun rights beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed. The high court has applied the 2nd Amendment in the context of possessing guns in the home, not in the streets, experts said.

Judge Sidney Thomas dissented, arguing that Thursday's decision "upends the entire California firearm regulatory scheme" and "needlessly intrudes and disrupts valid and constitutional legislative choices."

Thomas, a Clinton appointee, said the 2nd Amendment has never been interpreted to protect concealed carrying of guns in public and noted that the state of California was not named as a defendant, though its rules were effectively being struck down.

Senior Deputy San Diego County Counsel James Chapin, who represented San Diego in the case, called the lawsuit that led to Thursday's decision an "end run" against the state's new ban on openly carrying guns in public.

"What they really want to do is strike down California's open carry ban," Chapin said. "That's really what this is about."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert at UC Irvine's School of Law, expressed doubt that the decision would be upheld by a larger 9th Circuit panel, though the outcome might depend on which judges were randomly chosen to decide the case.

UCLA professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun laws, called the ruling "a huge victory for gun owners in California."

"They have been seeking the right to carry concealed weapons for years now," Winkler said.

Citing the 2012 ban on the open carrying of guns, Winkler said: "Gun control advocates have no one but themselves to blame for this ruling. You have to give someone some option to carry a gun."

He said that the ban on openly carrying unloaded guns affected relatively few people because most gun owners don't want the attention and questions that guns in public attract. But many more people might apply to carry concealed weapons, he said. "If you don't want many guns on the street, the answer is open carry," Winkler said.

Chuck Michel, who represented the gun owners in the case, said the suit targeted the San Diego sheriff because the county has an "active client base" of 2nd Amendment supporters. He said the county's rules discouraged gun owners from even applying for a concealed weapon permit.

The ruling affects only California and Hawaii among 9th Circuit states because the others have rules that favor the granting of permits to carry guns in public, according to Eugene Volokh, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA.

"California's rules are essentially unconstitutional because the rule is, your right to carry a gun is at the mercy of the sheriff," Volokh said.

Dianne Jacob, chairwoman of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, said her initial reaction was positive."I have no problem with law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons in the name of self-defense," Jacob said.

Gun control advocates expressed hope the decision would be overturned.

"The parents of Jordan Davis [a Florida teen allegedly slain for playing rap music too loudly at a gas station] and Trayvon Martin, whose children were killed by licensed concealed-carry holders, could educate the court about the real dangers posed by this legal error," said Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c...#ixzz2th4InUL9

Supreme Court declines challenges to gun laws