A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against key parts of California’s Unsafe Handgun Act that would require new semiautomatic handguns to be fitted with certain safety features, finding it violates the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney on March 20 ruled in favor of the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) and four individuals who had filed a lawsuit last year challenging the constitutionality of the law in the wake of a landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court setting new standards for evaluating firearm restrictions.
California’s Unsafe Handgun Act, which was enacted in 1999, sought to prevent accidental discharges according to advocates, and required new handguns to have three specific safety features.
These included an indicator showing whether the handgun is loaded and a disconnect mechanism to prevent it from being fired if the magazine is not fully inserted.
Under the law, new handguns also needed to have microstamping capability, enabling microscopic characters representing the handgun’s make, model, and serial number to be transferred onto shell casings when the handgun is fired so that law enforcement officials can more easily link the used casings to the guns they were fired from.
Safety Features Not ‘Commercially Practical’
In their lawsuit, plaintiffs had argued that the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms because no handguns were being manufactured that complied with all three of those features.
Specifically, they argued that the law and subsequent design features meant that buyers in the state had simply been left unable to purchase new state-of-the-art handguns because since 2013, when the microstamping requirement was introduced, not a single new semiautomatic handgun has been approved for sale in the state.
In his ruling on Monday (pdf), Carney—who was appointed by former President George W. Bush—noted that the technology effectuating microstamping on a broad scale is “simply not technologically feasible and commercially practical,” and that as a result of the law, Californian’s purchasing handguns today are “largely restricted to models from over sixteen years ago.”
