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6 Cartridges Better than 6.5 Creedmoor
SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — The City of San Jose is calling it a victory in the fight against gun violence a judge upholding the city’s Gun Harm Reduction Ordinance.
In 2022, the city of San Jose passed the first-of-its-kind ordinance requiring gun owners to have liability insurance.
The challenges against it began immediately with the city facing a lawsuit from groups like the National Association for Gun Rights.
Late last week a court dismissed the Second Amendment claims.
In effect since the start of 2023, gun owners have to have liability insurance and pay a fee of $25.
That fee would go to a nonprofit with the money to be used for firearm safety training, suicide prevention and more.
From the time the ordinance was announced it has faced backlash.
In January 2022, Harmeet K. Dhillon who represented the National Association for Gun Rights spoke at a press conference held to announce the lawsuit:
“It’s going to be the law-abiding citizens who actually deter crime by having weapons in their homes who are going to be the ones who bear the burden of this unconstitutional ordinance,” Dhillon said last year.
Along with the National Association for Gun Rights, plaintiffs also included the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Attorney Tamarah Prevost, a partner with Bay Area firm Cotchett, Pitre and McCarthy, took on the city’s case pro bono.
“We felt very confident that the ordinance was constitutional,” Prevost said. “The city did a lot of work on the front end to really craft something that it believed would be upheld, because the city is not taking guns away from people. It isn’t banning certain guns.”
The case was being fought as the U.S. Supreme Court came down with the Bruen Decision, one of the most significant cases regarding the Second Amendment.
The decision changed Second Amendment analysis in the courts and in turn, impacted the fight over the San Jose ordinance.
“We had to change gears and the judge had to change gears and apply a different legal standard that came down from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Prevost said. “The ordinance had to be evaluated based on historic precedent, what the framers in the 1800s would have thought of at the time, and whether an ordinance has historic roots as it were.”
With the change, Brady, a nonprofit that pushes for gun safety, was looked to by the court to weigh in.
The federal judge ruled Thursday that the insurance requirement for gun owners does not restrict gun firearm possession or use.
In a statement sent to ABC7 the National Gun Rights Association for Gun Rights said:
“This ruling is what happens when judges rely more on anti-gun groups like Brady than the actual ruling authorities here – namely the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court. This ruling makes a mockery of the Supreme Court’s Bruen standard with the claim that requiring an annual tax just to exercise a Second Amendment right somehow doesn’t actually violate that right.”
The statement goes on to say:
“No one would argue that having to pay $25 a year to petition your government or speak your mind wouldn’t violate those rights – and yet that is exactly what this court has claimed when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. This is a truly astounding example of bad-faith judicial acrobatics.”
The $25 fee that was also part of the ordinance still hasn’t been completely worked out by the city. As a result, the court said the fee is not ready for judicial review yet allowing the plaintiffs time to file an amended complaint.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s, chief counsel Timothy A. Bittle sent ABC7 this statement:
“The ruling last week by the federal District Court on the City’s latest motion to dismiss our Consolidated Amended Complaint in the San Jose gun fee case is nothing new. This is the third time the City has moved for dismissal and the third time its motion has been granted, but with leave for plaintiffs to file an amended complaint.
This revolving door of amended complaints and motions to dismiss is due to the City’s long delay in implementing the gun fee ordinance. The ordinance requires gun owners to annually pay a fee of an unspecified amount to a nonprofit organization that the City will designate. However, the City has yet to fix the final amount of the fee, set a date for payment of the fee to commence, or identify a nonprofit organization to collect the fee.
The City has argued in its motions to dismiss that, until these steps are taken, plaintiffs’ legal challenge is premature. The Court has repeatedly granted the City’s motion, setting a date by which the City is “expected” to take the necessary steps, followed by a specific deadline for plaintiffs to file an amended complaint. When the City fails to take the necessary steps by the expected date, plaintiffs ask the City to stipulate to an extension of time for the filing of their amended complaint. The City refuses. We file an amended complaint. The City files a motion to dismiss, and round and round we go.
Fortunately, in again granting us leave to amend this time, the Judge did not impose a date certain for us to file our amended complaint, but rather gave us an open-ended deadline of 14 days after the City reports that the necessary actions have been taken.”
While it’s still not entirely clear yet whether appeals or amended complaints will be made by the plaintiffs, Prevost says she and the City of San Jose are ready to continue fighting.
“We are going to fight for the constitutionality of this law until the very end,” she said. “It may go up to the U.S. Supreme Court, we’re prepared for that.”
13-year-old boy crashes stolen car into LAPD motorcycle officer, another vehicle, police say
A 13-year-old boy faces a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after he struck a motorcycle officer with a stolen car, then hit another car in the San Fernando Valley, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, a motorcycle officer was flagged down about a reported stolen car, and when the officer found the allegedly stolen vehicle, it did not yield to a traffic stop, the LAPD said in a news release.
During “a short pursuit,” the allegedly stolen car hit the officer’s motorcycle, then “another uninvolved motorist,” the release said.
The boy driving the car and the passenger, a 15-year-old girl, were taken into custody, police sai.d
While the girl was released, the boy was booked into juvenile hall on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. His identity is not being released due to his age.
The officer and third-party motorist have been hospitalized and released.
BOLINGBROOK, Ill. (WLS) — Police in Bolingbrook said two people are dead after a gun went off as its owner cleaned it Saturday evening.
Police said a preliminary investigation found 61-year-old Simeon Hendrickson was working on one of his guns inside his home in the 700-block of Dalton Lane Saturday around 5:45 p.m. when it accidentally discharged.
The bullet struck his wife, 60-year-old Laurie Hendrickson.
It was not clear if Hendrickson called 911, or if one of his neighbors heard the gunshot and called for help.
Hendrickson then took his own life with the handgun. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Laurie Hendrickson was taken to a local hospital for treatment, where she later died.
Police said the incident remains under investigation. No further details have been released.
This is an early Colt SP1 AR15, similar to my first one bought
after year’s toil as a janitor in a print shop.
God designed us to work. Anything outside that paradigm is innately deleterious to the human psyche. I got a job about 10 minutes after I got my driver’s license and I’ve worked pretty much every day since.
Back in my day, you got your license at your fifteenth birthday. I wouldn’t trust today’s 15-year-old boys unsupervised with underarm deodorant, much less an automobile, but it was a different time. I actually took my first solo jaunt behind the wheel at 13-years-old, but that’s a story for a different time.
My very first job was arguably the coolest I have ever had. I was a janitor in a print shop and got to wear any raggedy clothes that might cover my gangly carcass. I learned to operate an offset press, run a Heidelberg windmill and clean the heck out of a toilet. I also came to appreciate that smoking can be very bad for you.
My partner in crime was a delightful soul named Maurice. Maurice was unimaginably cool, but he was also a heavy smoker. We maintained big drums of some kind of cleaning fluid used to clean the presses. It was kerosene, or nitroglycerine, or pure liquified plutonium or something. I, myself, was a bit afraid of the stuff. We dispensed it from those squirt bottles that restaurants use for ketchup.
This was the Mississippi Delta in summertime, so it was Africa-hot. The air was so thick you could tear off a chunk and gnaw on it. There was no air conditioning, so we kept the doors standing open. There was a fan, as I recall, but stirring around superheated air doesn’t help much, thermodynamically speaking.
Maurice hovered over a printing press fretting with something or other, the ubiquitous cigarette dangling from his lips. I was on the other side of the shop but glanced up just in time to appreciate the setting. As luck would have it, he was standing with his back to the open door.
Maurice squirted some of that vile elixir across the top of the press just as he took a quick inhale on his smoldering coffin nail. Gasoline is actually 15-times more energetic per unit gram that Trinitrotoluene (TNT). Though I don’t know exactly what this stuff was, it was something like that.
The explosion produced a palpable overpressure within the building. The force lifted Maurice up and propelled him backwards out through the open door. When I got to his side he was on his back and a bit singed, but otherwise unhurt, the cigarette still dangled from his lips. We even got the fire put out on the printing press without any lasting deleterious effects.
My experience working at that print shop taught me both the value of hard work and the dangers of smoking.
A Man On A Mission
I toiled away under such conditions as those for a full year, scraping and saving to buy my first black rifle. I bought that SP1 AR15 in 1982; my dad had to do the 4473 for me. It cost me $486, or the equivalent of $1,329 today — wow!
I stripped that rifle down to pins and springs and learned every nuance of its design. I bought ammo every time I could afford it — a box or two at a time — and shot it into the side of the old levee out near the Mississippi River. I didn’t own a set of ear plugs, so it’s a wonder I can hear at all today.
I once shot a squirrel with that thing but immediately wished I hadn’t. I am a strict adherent to the axiom that one should not kill anything one isn’t planning to eat, and afterwards this particular tree rat was no longer comestible. However, I did get to the point where I could run the weapon both quickly and well, skills that held me in good stead later when I was issued something similar.
Ruminations
I brought that rifle to school on occasion, most commonly to show off either to fellow students or faculty. As Satan had not yet invented school shootings, I even had my picture taken for the yearbook with it. Innocence once lost can never again be regained.
In a fit of insensate stupidity, I traded that rifle for a SIG SAUER P226 at a gun show. I have since replaced it with another made in 1966, the year of my birth, but it’s just not the same. That black rifle represented the fruits of an entire year’s toil replete with copious heat, sweat and filth. In retrospect, I think it was a steal.