President Joe Biden supports a ban on assault weapons like the one that has been in place in California since 1989. On June 4, however, Roger Benitez, United States judge for the Southern District of California, ruled that California’s ban is unconstitutional.
The judge is probably correct.
Benitez’s ruling is a peculiar piece of work for a document that aspires to serious legal analysis. The ruling’s tone and the judge’s personal high regard for assault weapons are obvious in its first sentence: “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”
Elsewhere Benitez’s prose smacks of the oppression that pro-gun advocates claim to endure at the hands of anti-gun zealots: “Under this relaxed test a state could enter a person’s home without a warrant and seize him or his guns in violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition of searches and seizures without a warrant.” This is paranoia worthy of an NRA lobbyist.
Benitez devotes a couple of pages to breathless descriptions of six cases in which homeowners used AR-15s to thwart home invasions, but he doesn’t acknowledge that this is anecdotal evidence, which should be of questionable standing in legal analysis.