CALIFORNIA GUN VIOLENCE RESTRAINING ORDER BLUEPRINT

Written by Bill Slomanson

I. SECOND AMENDMENT

The validity of any gun law begins with the threshold issue applicable to all jurisdictions. As the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights provides: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The U.S. Supreme Court elevated this right to fundamental right status in 2008. (District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) 554 U.S. 570, 593-594.) The court extended that guarantee to all states in 2010. (McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) 561 U.S. 742, 791.)

Subsequent calls for expansion pressured the court to augment this in-home right. (See Slomanson, Second Amendment: Supreme Court’s Constitutional Orphan, Daily Journal, p. 1 (June 17, 2020).) The court’s blockbuster 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen (2022) 597 U.S. 1 upholstered an explosive recoil. For decades, state and federal courts had uniformly applied a balancing oriented level-of-scrutiny approach to gun right analyses. The Bruen majority nevertheless conjured a new test for gun litigation, threatening to upend numerous state and federal gun control laws. (See Slomanson, California’s Gun Purchase Waiting Period: A History of the Future (2023) 36 Cal. Lit. 32.) Bruen thus held that "the government must demonstrate that the [challenged] regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation." (Bruen, 597 U.S. at p. 17.)