California cannot ban gun owners from having detachable magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The decision from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez won’t take effect immediately. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has already filed a notice to appeal the ruling. The ban is likely to remain in effect while the case is still pending.
This is the second time Benitez has struck down California’s law banning certain types of magazines. The first time he struck it down — way back in 2017 — an appeals court ended up reversing his decision.
Pornography is protected under the first amendment, and sharing it via the internet is allowed. Child pornography is illegal and should stay illegal. Similarly there are other forms of speech that are criminal and should stay criminal, such as death threats. I think you would agree that these are reasonable regulations on our free speech.
Here’s an example on the gun side: in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, bump stocks were used, allowing one man to kill 60 people and injure an additional 867 (just to confirm this is not a typo: 927 people were killed or harmed). Bump stocks were banned in 2018. The bump stock ban seems justified to me, does it seem justified to you?
No, as knee-jerk reactions to a single facet of an outlier event are absurd.
As an comparison, your highlight of child porn is due to the actual harm of actual abuse - the thing is banned because it cannot exist without traumatizing and abusing children. Your highlight of an outlier shooting is really the highlight of the potential harm of a future event - the thing might maybe be used for harm.
Most of us don’t live our lives in terror of inanimate objects or overrepresented and oversensationalized events.
Point of fact: child pornography is obscene–and not covered by 1A–even if no real people are harmed. I’d have to dig up the law (I think it dates to the mid-90s), but it’s pretty broad. Lolicon may be illegal by itself, even though drawings don’t generally cause direct harm. At least one person has been convicted of obscenity for comics, albeit not lolicon. It is *likely that even AI-generated child pornography, even though it wouldn’t involve real children, would end up being ruled obscene.
Personally, I would take your position; images and depictions of child pornography that don’t involve actual minors should not be obscene and therefore illegal, regardless of how distasteful and repellent they are.
Real child pornography should only be illegal because of the harms it represents. The text of the First Amendment would clearly protect victimless obscenity.
Interesting - I was not aware of that. I’ll have to dig up the law and related rulings - I suspect the judges’ opinions on the matter would help clarify the reasoning for arriving at such a stance and would help me understand if, say, they might be due to mimicry of that actual harm and actual abuse, etc.
I appreciate that highlight.
I truly don’t know. In the case I linked to–and it’s just the Wikipedia article–SCOTUS declined to hear the case. So it’s good case law at the moment.
Maybe if someone could get an obscene comic banned that was drawing about Nazis, our current SCOTUS would overturn it in favor of 1A rights…
If you say so.
It is worth pointing out that in the Las Vegas shooting the investigation never concluded if he actually used the bump stocks. Some of the guns had them installed but with his amount of preparation and knowledge of firearms he could have just as easily modified them to be fully automatic. During the course of the investigation they specifically prohibited the ATF from inspecting any of the weapons for modifications and merely said that the use of the bump stocks was a possibility, not a fact. The bottom line is it isn’t known one way or another if he actually used them, he might have but the firing rate was more consistent than most bump firing.