(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – In a move that seemingly protects gun rights, a federal judge has stopped the enforcement of a long-standing California law mandating certain security features for newly developed handguns.
Federal District Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled that California’s Unsafe Handgun Act, adopted in 2001, was unnecessarily harsh and violated Second Amendment rights.
“These regulations are having a devastating impact on Californians’ ability to acquire and use new, state-of-the-art handguns,” reads the order issued by Carney, who President George W. Bush appointed.
The National Review reports that California’s Unsafe Handgun Act is supposed to prevent accidental handgun discharges with various safety standards.
As per the state law, some handguns should have a chamber-load indicator and a magazine-disconnect mechanism to ensure they cannot be fired unless the magazine is fully inserted.
The Unsafe Handgun Act also seeks to help with gun-crime investigations, thus mandating that firearms need a microstamping mechanism.
That mechanism enables the microscopic imprints revealing the handgun’s make, model, and serial number onto shell casings when the firearm is used.
According to Judge Carney, however, the microstamping technology is “not technologically feasible and commercially practical” for incorporation into new handguns on a grander scale.
His order argues that the rule has stifled the production of more advanced handguns, thus preventing Americans residing in California from exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.
“Since 2013, when the microstamping requirement was introduced, not a single new semiautomatic handgun has been approved for sale in California,” the judge wrote.
“When Californians today buy a handgun at a store, they are largely restricted to models from over sixteen years ago,” he added.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Unsafe Handgun Act include four individuals, plus the California Rifle & Pistol Association.
The gun-rights organization launched a legal challenge to the state law in August 2022.
The report points out that California’s attorneys claimed there had been safety laws on gun manufacturing in the United States since the nation’s early years.
Thus, there was a regulation for properly storing gunpowder to avoid accidental fires, which goes back to the Founding Era.
The state of California also maintained that the Unsafe Guns Act does not ban the possession of all handguns, only those considered likely to fire accidentally.
The plaintiffs, however, argued that the state law harmed their gun rights, as clearly stated in the United States Constitution.
“Enforcing those requirements implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment, and the government fails to point to any well-established historical analogues that are consistent with them, those requirements are unconstitutional and their enforcement must be preliminarily enjoined,” the judge wrote.
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