Judge rules that California’s 34-year-old ban on so-called “assault weapons” is unconstitutional

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If this ruling holds, Californians for the first time in decades will have their full Second Amendment right to own any commonly used gun necessary to protect themselves and their families from imminent threat.

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A federal judge has ruled that California’s 1989 ban on “assault weapons,” defined generally as “high-capacity, semi-automatic rifles,” is unconstitutional, making it once again legal for Californians to own an unrestricted AR-15.

U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez had previously determined that the Assault Weapons Control Act violated the Second Amendment, but his ruling was vacated on appeal. However, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Pistol and Rifle Assn v. Bruen in 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded the case of Miller v. Becerra back to Benitez for him to once again consider.

The second time around, in a 79-page decision, the judge wrote that “Americans have an individual right to keep and bear firearms. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution ‘guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.’ Whether citizens ever fire or need to fire their weapons, is not important. This guarantee is fully binding on the States and limits their ability to devise solutions to social problems.”

He added that the guarantee protects “the possession of weapons that are ‘in common use,’’ or arms that are ‘typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes” and that judges must “interpret the Constitution based on the text and original understanding of the relevant provision—not on public policy considerations, or worse, fear of public opprobrium or criticism from the political branches.’”

California’s assault weapons ban is highly complex and has been modified repeatedly over the last several decades. To be “California legal,” AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons, including pistols and shotguns, are subject to a number of restrictions, including the barrel length, magazine capacity, and other added features. AR-15s that are allowed to be owned in California are not nearly as lethal as a self-defense weapon as those AR-15s sold in other states.

Benitez ruled that “other than their looks” AR-15 style weapons are essentially the same as any other legally owned rifle. He noted too that the California legislature had passed its ban at a time when the balancing of interests was allowed, with lawmakers reasoning that the interest of keeping citizens safe from gun violence was higher than that of their right to possess the firearms.

“That was then,” he wrote. “Today, the Supreme Court has very clearly ended modern interest balancing when it comes to the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment, the Court said, ‘is the very product of an interest balancing by the people and it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms for self-defense.’”

He explained,

“The American tradition is rich and deep in protecting a citizen’s enduring right to keep and bear common arms like rifles, shotguns, and pistols. However, among the American tradition of firearm ownership, there is nothing like California’s prohibition on rifles, shotguns, and handguns based on their looks or attributes. Here, the ‘assault weapon’ prohibition has no historical pedigree and it is extreme.”

Benitez argued that the AR-15 is popular because Americans use it for self-defense.

“Guns for self-defense are needed a lot because crime happens a lot,” he wrote. “A recent large-scale survey estimates that guns are needed defensively approximately 1,670,000 times a year.” He also referenced another report, originally commissioned and long cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which “estimated that there are between 500,000 and 3,000,000 defensive gun uses in the United States each year. That is a lot of situations where Jane Doe needs a firearm to defend herself and her family.”

The judge went on to state that while mass shootings are highly publicized, the public is often unaware of the numerous instances during which a person successfully used an AR-15 in self-defense. He provided several examples of this, including a man who used his AR-15 and 30 rounds of ammunition to successfully defend himself against seven masked and armed attackers who had broken into his house and fired a gun at him and a 61-year-old disabled man who fended off three armed attackers with his AR-15.

Benitez wrote that California’s law takes away Californians’ right to use these weapons to defend themselves and their families. He also argued that AR-15s are almost never used when committing crimes, pointing to statistics showing that rifles of any type are only used in 0.0000014 percent of homicides.

While gun rights advocates hailed the decision, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, responded angrily to the ruling, describing it as “radical” and “a direct insult to every victim of a mass shooting and their families.”

Judge Benitez gave state officials 10 days to seek a stay on the ruling so they could appeal to the Ninth Circuit. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he has already filed a notice of appeal.

As the Freedom Center has explained before, the term “assault weapon” is a political tool and not one of substance. Even the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) couldn’t provide a definition for it when testifying before Congress

While gun control advocates like to characterize semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15 as “military” weapons, they are nothing of the sort. U.S. servicemembers don’t use AR-15s. They use the M4 carbine, which is a fully automatic rifle. “Semiautomatic” simply means the user can fire one round per pull of the trigger without manually reloading.

Sadly, in today’s era, there are too many instances when a person needs a firearm to defend themselves against attackers and home invasions and sometimes they need a weapon that can fire more than 10 rounds at a time.

This was certainly the case, as Judge Benitez noted in his ruling, when a pregnant wife and mother in Florida was able to retrieve an AR-15 from the bedroom and stop a home invasion, during which two armed intruders pistol-whipped her husband and tried to kidnap her 11-year-old daughter. “It does not require much imagination to think what would have happened next if the woman had lived in California and could not possess such a firearm,” he wrote.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to own the gun necessary for a person to successfully defend themselves and their family, and that gun includes an unrestricted AR-15. Now, assuming this ruling is upheld, Californians for the first time in decades will be able to fully avail themselves of that right.

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