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Notes -
Hawaii v Heller
The Hawaii Firearms Coalition claims:
The specific statute is here, with the most relevant components being :
Note that this is a permit to acquire; the permit to carry involves different timelines and different requirements. There's some lack of clarity here -- where HFC claims that the police stopped accepting applications on the 18th of December, the police claim that they're accepting applications and will only require the training certification when people pick up a permit. It's possible, if not especially unlikely, that the permit training process will be resolved in a reasonable timeframe, to plausibly fair ends, but if the Honolulu Police genuinely were still accepting permit applications on the 18th, their best-case timeline to meet statutory requirements has less than a week between .
There are various other issues with this statute -- like other jursdictions, Hawaii's law
defies'complies with' Heller and Bruen by changing "good cause" requirements to a "good character" one (requiring denial of a permit "if the issuing authority determines that issuance would not be in the interest of public health, safety, or welfare because the person lacks the essential character or temperament necessary"); it demands permitee applicants provide the police open access to their mental health records; it removed external validation of training courses (before this law, the NRA could certify instructors). And there's the general dissolution of trust, when gun nuts have long cited concerns that training requirements would be used to throttle or delay lawful gun ownership, and it just so happens to not be a priority for five months after the law itself was an emergency.But the timeline provides a clearer problem of justiciability. As Illinois and New Mexico recently demonstrated, the courts are not particularly willing to step in early, but here it's not particularly clear how the courts would do so. By leaving the "certified or verified firearms instructor" up to local police, nearly-any challenge can be instantly mooted or otherwise have its factual underpinning pulled away with no more than a minute's effort, only to be upset again later (not even necessarily by bad action by the police, if only a few trainers sign up to start with!). And a court not willing to could leave this catch-22 in place for months, if not years.
Well, at least that's a one-off, and Hawaii's long been a basket case so-
California vs. Carry Permittees
In response to Bruen, California pass SB2 on September 26th, to take force on January 1st of the new year. Among many other restrictions, the law overhauled concealed carry within the state, including where a permittee could lawfully carry. Politicians supporting the law stated, both in press conferences and during the resulting lawsuits, that about the only place permittees could lawfully carry after the law passed would be a public streets and sidewalks, and that's actually a little more broad than the actual text of the law allows. There's been a few California-side gunnies who've videoed long and non-exclusive lists of behaviors that the law bans, though unfortunately I haven't seen any set to the Animaniacs country song (yet).
On December 20th a district court judge enjoined the law's enforcement, in a biting order that focused mostly on the restrictions on the right to bear arms, but didn't stop from noticing where the law was also often just built to make compliance difficult if not impossible, for example, that:
This decision was, unsurprisingly, appealed along with a request for a stay, allowing the law to go into effect. On December 30th, an administrative stay was granted, and the "stay pending appeal, and the supplements, responses and replies thereto, are otherwise referred to the panel assigned to decide the merits of these appeals".
It's not clear if a merits panel has even been assigned, as of January 4th.
What happens next will depend very heavily on that merits panel. Traditionally, the calculations for a stay pending appeal would strongly favor blocking a law that hasn't yet come into play. But a number of justices at the 9th Circuit have a long history of both antipathy toward the Second Amendment and willingness to buck SCOTUS dicta; while I'm not going to say that a sizable number would never block enforcement of a gun control law, I've already winked suggestively. There are also non-trivial reasons to suspect the odds of a favorable merits panel to not be quite as simple as a dice-roll.
And the longer the statute has been allowed to apply -- four days already! -- the easier is it to imagine this becoming the new status quo.
Well, at least it's easier to get a permit, even if you can't do anything with it-
California vs. Carry Permit
Over the holidays, California DoJ also issued a intering emergency rule-making package. Among a wide variety of other regulatory changes, the process submits a new BOF 1034 CCW Program DOJ Certifed Instructor Application, which among other requirements demands application attach a copy of a certification from :
And a shooting course qualification from one of :
At least from a casual read, this looks to be in explicit conflict with relevant California statutes, which also include the Civilian Marksmanship Program and NRA. It's also... not especially clear if any of these programs exist and are available to normal people: of the few that aren't explicitly tied to law enforcement or military training, like the State of California accredited school firearms training course, are still mostly law-enforcement-focused. ((I also wonder how well California's administrative notice law is being served by a notice for rule-making that was only open between December 22nd and December 27th.))
At a deeper level, though, it's a near fulfillment of long-standing gunnie fears that training requirements could be leveraged into otherwise-controversial restrictions. It's hard to take the requirements as seriously focused on preventing harm. Perhaps there's some argument about applied evenly-
New Mexico
KOB4 reports:
Further posts from the group make very clear this is almost certainly in violation of both New Mexico's new laws, but also long-present federal ones, sometimes in hilarious ways, and that the NMPGV knew those rules.
These laws often stupid, especially in this context! Officially, a local sheriff has opened an investigation, but realistically, nothing's going to happen here but some egg on some faces. Yes, it's the sort of illegal that gets federal agents to shoot your dog and son and wife if they need to pump up their rookie numbers, but not the sort of illegal that those agents treat seriously. After all, going after political allies "would not promote public safety".
I don’t agree with forcing expansive gun rights on liberal states whose electorates have clearly rejected them.
Complain legitimately about the way in which red states had progressive politics forced upon them (in some cases at gunpoint). And by all means advocate the federal government enforcing policy on the states when it comes to borders, immigration, foreign policy and (actual) interstate commerce, as conservatives rightly do in the first two cases.
But I see no reason why conservative gun owners must force the population of Hawaii to accept a law which both doesn’t affect the gun policy of conservative states and is transparently deeply unpopular there. Similarly, I’d find it wrong if and when a progressive Supreme Court limited gun ownership rights in a conservative state.
It doesn’t seem bad if Texas is the Wild West and Hawaii is East Asia when it comes to gun policy. Conservatives still have plenty of places to live. Regional differences in view on permissiveness around vices, weapon ownership, abortion and so on are part of the normal tapestry of life in countries with hundreds of millions of people.
Fine. Then Kim Davis gets her job back, all lawsuits dismissed, and gay marriage only exists in gay-friendly states. Otherwise, none of this "Federalism for thee but not for me stuff". Particularly since unlike gay marriage, gun rights are in the Constitution.
Gun rights are in the bill of rights, but given every legal benefit and cost around marriage I still think it's insane to deny recognition of gay marriage. It seems trivially easy to classify under equal protection.
No, it really isn't; it's a huge stretch that would never have occurred to the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment.
After Obergefell, any official dissenter (and as far as I can tell Kim Davis was the only one) was overruled, fired and ruined. When the same is done to all these legislators, bureaucrats, governors, and lower court judges who are making Heller and Bruen into mere academic exercises, THEN perhaps gun rights will have been properly taken seriously.
Which of the following do you think should be covered under gun rights? Single-shot normal rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, SMGs, single-shot pistols, anti-materiel rifles, machine guns, technicals/IFVs, MANPADs, recoilless rifles, rocket launchers, tanks, Davy Crocketts?
(This is not mockery. The argument that's literally in the 2A - militia makes you harder to conquer - applies to all of the above except maybe Davy Crocketts.)
What sort of things do you think should be covered under free speech? Advertisements for restaurants, fiction novels, history papers, science papers, instructions on how to do illegal things, porn, advocacy of violent overthrow of the government, smears of politicians, orders to do illegal things?
Which is to say, I don't know the point of the question. Often enough similar question are asked in order to either say "Oh, so there's a limit... let's just push that back until a Brown Bess is covered but not much more" or "You monster, you'd accept nukes". Gun rights cover all of those except technicals and tanks (vehicles rather than arms) and maybe the nuclear projectile for Davy Crocketts. But just because I'm open to excluding the Davy Crockett doesn't mean I'm at all willing to play the game of "well, modern guns have a much higher rate of fire than 1781 muskets, so they shouldn't be covered either".
My parenthetical note was intended to make it clear that I'm not trying to do that foot-in-the-door tactic, but simply trying to get someone else's opinion on the matter. But whatever, you answered which is what I wanted. Is your line at vehicles driven by the actual text of 2A ("bear" arms), or by some argument I don't currently comprehend?
As for your question retort: not orders, and I split hairs on instructions/advocacy/smears. Specifically:
The actual text. It's an academically interesting question about whether mounting a gun in the back of a Toyota Hilux counts under "bearing arms", but the Hilux itself isn't covered under "arms".
As we saw with COVID, that's an exception that can swallow most of the rule.
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I would say - if you can lift it and it doesn't kill indiscriminatory - it is protected under 2A. If it is - kills what it hits - 2A protection, if it is - anything in the area dies - it is not.
From your list - rifles, shotguns, smg, pistols, anti material rifles, machine guns, lasers, drones that stab.
reciolless rifles, rocket launchers, drones with grenades, davy crocketts - no
DMV can take care of the edge cases of tanks and IFV
Above is for the individual right to bear arms.
But here is the thing - a well regulated militia should have access to all of the above but the nukes and other WMD
Those are just regular rifles, but oversized. I think they should be legal.
They usually fire HE or HEAT. Flechette rounds would be legit, I suppose. ...Also, the backblast is pretty indiscriminate in and of itself.
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