Category: California
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
Further bolstering the case against the state of California for restricting gun purchases to one a month, the National Rifle Association has filed a brief with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in the lawsuit challenging that law.
In the case Nguyen v. Bonta, plaintiffs argue that the law restricting firearm purchases to no more than one every 30 days is a violation of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. In March, a U.S. District Court ruled the law to be unconstitutional, but the state—never opposed to wasting citizens’ tax dollars—appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court.
In the brief, the NRA argues that the law violates the Second Amendment because the right to “keep and bear” arms includes the right to “acquire” firearms.
“This Court has twice held that the Second Amendment protects the right to acquire arms,” the brief stated. “This Court’s prior holdings are supported by Supreme Court precedent. First, the Supreme Court has determined that ‘keep Arms’ in the Amendment’s text means to ‘have weapons,’ and the plain meaning of ‘have’ encompasses the act of acquisition. Second, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that certain rights are implicit in enumerated guarantees. In the Second Amendment context, four Justices have recognized—and none have disagreed—that firearms training is ‘a necessary concomitant’ of the right to keep and bear arms. As this Court, the Third Circuit, and many district courts have recognized, acquiring a firearm must be a necessary concomitant as well.”
The brief further argues that multiple gun purchases per month were common in early America, and there were no historical limitations on the number of firearms that law-abiding citizens could purchase—a fact the government must prove under the new Bruen standard.
“The State argues that a more nuanced analogical approach is required because historically firearms were too laborious to manufacture and too expensive to purchase for firearms to be available for bulk purchase,” the brief stated. “In fact, firearms were ubiquitous in early America, and affordable enough for every militiaman and many women to be required to purchase one or several firearms. Indeed, newspaper advertisements regularly offered large quantities of firearms for sale.”
Further bolstering that point, the brief continued: “In any event, California does not merely prohibit “bulk” purchases; it prohibits the purchase of even two firearms in one month. Americans commonly purchased multiple firearms in a single transaction in the colonial and founding eras—and no law ever forbade it.” The brief also pointed out that the state “failed to provide a single historical law limiting how many firearms someone could purchase in a month. Nor did the State provide any founding era regulation.”
In the end, the brief calls for the circuit court to affirm the earlier district court ruling that the law is unconstitutional.
AP Photo/Damian DovarganesThe lurch to the left continued, however, and now the LA Times has metamorphosed into some hideous amalgam of the Daily Worker, the Advocate, and the bulletin board in some Williams College freshman dorm. Nowhere has the paper’s leftward drift been more evident than in its coverage of crime and law enforcement.
The latest example is a March 7 editorial that lamented the 30th anniversary of California’s “three strikes” law, which mandated lengthy prison sentences for repeat felons. In their lamentation, the editors cite the woeful tale of Jerry Dewayne Williams, who in 1995 received a sentence of 25 years to life for having committed what they would have their readers believe was the mere theft of a slice of pizza.
Though initially charged with robbery, Williams was convicted of the lesser felony of “petty theft with a prior.” Nevertheless, his rap sheet was of sufficient opulence to trigger the three strikes law. In writing about Williams in 2010, by which time he had petitioned for and won his release from prison, the Times called him the “pizza thief,” as though his crime, like Jean Valjean’s in “Les Miserables,” had been motivated by hunger. Though elided completely in the recent editorial — and nearly completely in the 2010 story — the circumstances of the pizza theft were more sinister than the Times would have its readers believe.
Williams and some companions were on the Redondo Beach pier one evening in 1994 when they came across four children, ages 7 to 15, sharing a pizza. Williams walked up and hovered menacingly over the children, picked up a slice of pizza, and began eating it as though daring them to try to stop him. Fearful of being assaulted by Williams and his friends, they did nothing. But they did report the incident to their parents, who called the police, who in turn found Williams nearby and arrested him.
Though the jury deadlocked on the robbery charge, Williams’s conduct clearly met the elements of California Penal Code section 211, which defines robbery as the “felonious taking of personal property in the possession of another, from his person or immediate presence, and against his will, accomplished by means of force or fear.” Williams didn’t take the pizza merely to satisfy a craving; he did it for the thrill he received from intimidating four children. He told police that after taking one bite from the slice he threw the rest in the ocean. Note that in the law cited above, no minimum value of the stolen property is established; it is the conduct that is punished regardless of how trivial the loss. (I once arrested a man and saw him sentenced to prison for robbing one of his neighbors of 75 cents.)
But the minimization of Williams’s misdeed is far from the most glaring defect in the editorial. It notes correctly that by the time California’s three strikes law was passed in 1994, the crime wave that inspired it had already crested, but it goes on to say that crime saw a historic plunge, though without attributing any of that plunge to the law the Times today condemns. “A host of tough-on-crime measures followed from both Republicans and Democrats,” said the editors, “even as crime continued its free fall.”
Thus do the Times editors exhibit their willful blindness to the simple fact that locking up more criminals caused the decline in crime, first by deterring lawbreakers but more importantly by incarcerating them. As Rafael Mangual notes in his book “Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurst Most”, prisons “spare the general public from the crimes those incarcerated would have otherwise committed if they were out on the street.”
But to the editors at the LA Times, crime was in “free fall,” as though affected by nothing other than some mysterious elemental force akin to gravity, a force that causes crime to rise or fall regardless of what methods are employed to combat it.
But again, credit the LA Times for consistency in their error on law enforcement matters. They endorsed George Gascón in his recent primary campaign to remain as Los Angeles County district attorney, and no doubt will do so again as he faces former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman in November’s general election. In their endorsement, the editors wrote that the number of felony cases his office has filed “is on par with that of earlier administrations.” This may be true, as far as it goes, but the number of filings is not the only or most reliable indicator of his office’s commitment to public safety. “The argument that Gascón is lax or lenient on crime,” say the Times editors, “simply does not hold up to the facts.”
Is that so? Then why, we may ask, is it still Gascón’s policy not to seek increased felony sentences under circumstances in which California law explicitly calls for them?
Here are some facts the LA Times editors may have overlooked: In the city of Los Angeles, year to date, homicides are up by 16%, robberies by 14%, and burglaries by 4%. In 77th Street Division, one of the city’s 21 patrol stations, homicides are up by 167% and burglaries are up by 56%.
The question is a simple one: Where would we prefer criminals to live, in our neighborhoods or in prison?