For one week, law-abiding Californians were prohibited from carrying concealed under the state’s Bruen-defying law, Senate Bill 2 (SB2). On Monday there were relieved of that infringement and will remain free to carry nearly everywhere in the Golden State until the issue is finally resolved in April.
The New American reported in late December that a U.S. District Court in California eviscerated SB2 (which tried to expand the “sensitive places” comment in Bruen to include virtually the entire state). Wrote Judge Cormac Carney:
SB2’s coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court….
SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a “sensitive place”, effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.
He stopped the law from becoming effective because “the challenged SB2 provisions constitutionally deprive this group of their constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.”
California’s anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, and anti-Bruen Attorney General Rob Bonta promised that he would appeal, because, he said, “tens of millions of Californians will face a heightened risk of gun violence” if SB2 was quashed.
This, of course, is a lie of the first order. After a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Bonta’s successful appeal on Monday, Kostas Moros, a lawyer representing the California Pistol and Rifle Association, said:
The right to carry in California was unconstitutionally eliminated for almost a week.
We are relieved the status quo has been restored, and Californians with CCW permits, who are among the most law-abiding people there are, can resume carrying as they have for years.
John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has repeatedly shown that concealed-carry citizens are among the most law-abiding of any group in the country, with gun-related violations at one-twelfth that of police officers!
Related article:
California’s “Sensitive Places” Gun Ban Cannot Stand Against Bruen, Court Rules
