There has been talk of modeling a law against gun ownership that mimics Texas’s pre-Dobbs Roe circumvention for a while now. Said attempt at firearm regulation is more important now than ever, as it would give lawmakers and judges the context to know how absolute the right to personal gun ownership is after Bruen. People against mass murders think the solution is common sense gun control — gun advocates won’t stop until teachers have guns and the actual schools are bullet proof. I wish I were joking; here are the teachers and the schools respectively. California just did its part to figure out this Court’s limits on its gun jurisprudence.
..SB 1327, authored by Senator Bob Hertzberg (D-San Fernando Valley), allows Californians to sue those making, selling, transporting or distributing illegal assault weapons and ghost guns – guns made at home to avoid tracing – for damages of at least $10,000 per weapon involved. The same damages are also available against gun dealers who illegally sell firearms to those under 21 years of age. The legislation is modeled after Texas’ wrongheaded anti-abortion bill, SB 8, which places $10,000 bounties on doctors, providers and others involved in providing life-saving abortion care.
“Our message to the criminals spreading illegal weapons in California is simple: you have no safe harbor here in the Golden State. While the Supreme Court rolls back reasonable gun safety measures, California continues adding new ways to protect the lives of our kids. California will use every tool at its disposal to save lives, especially in the face of an increasingly extreme Supreme Court,” said Governor Newsom.
Gauntlet thrown. Not just to SCOTUS — but to Texas as well.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom is running full-page ads in Texas newspapers trolling Greg Abbott by highlighting a new California gun control law modeled on Texas' 'vigilante' abortion ban. https://t.co/KKYs5H5tYz
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 24, 2022
I have dabbled in petty. I’ve done my fair share of up high, down low, too slows. Handshakes to hair parts. Dropped your pockets even. But this shit is beyond me. This is 50 Cent-level petty. And I am here for it. While it is true that Newsom’s bragging in Texas is an unnecessary reach into the goings-on of another state, it doesn’t touch Texas’s attempt to punish patients who get abortions out of the state with long-arm statutes.
From a legal standpoint, I think that the most interesting thing about this law is that its structure mimics SB8. Those fighting the law in court will be in the tricky position to find arguments against the gun law that do not act as parallel take-down arguments that similarly undercut the basis for punishing those who aid abortions. Maybe Texas and states like it should have learned the lesson of War Games — sometimes the only winning move is not to play, lest you risk mutually assured destruction. There may be a strong convergence of forced birth gun advocates to come.
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.palimpsest