Yesterday, June 6, 2023, federal judge Robert J. Bryan issued a ruling denying a preliminary injunction against Washington’s “assault weapon” ban. In my not so humble opinion, this proves that it is high time for the elderly –88 years old — Bryan to retire.
Reading his decision, a couple of points jumped out at me. I’ll begin with one that would almost be funny if the topic, victim disarmament, weren’t so serious.
Semiautomatic assault weapons represent a significant technological change – they allow a shooter to fire as fast as they can pull the trigger, unlike previous guns.
Possibly the mentally challenged judge meant that such arms can be fired repeatedly “as fast as they can pull the trigger.” But specificity in law matters; we’ll take him at his specific written word, and note that any firearm, since the medieval hand cannons fired by setting a light to the touch hole, can be fired simply by pulling the trigger.
Allowing that maybe in his dotage he did mean rapid repeat fire…
Paging Jerry Miculek!. Eight rounds on target. In one second. With a revolver, not a semiautomatic firearm.
Moving on to the very next sentence:
While semiautomatic weapons like the AR-15 were invented in the 1950s, the growth in ownership of semiautomatic assault weapons proliferated in the late 2000s.
Invented in the 1950s? The first successful semiautomatic rifle design came in 1885. Bryan only missed it by seventy years. And the first semiautomatic pistol was 1891.
Bryan, please note those were in the 19th century. We’re currently in the 21st century, and the basic idea of semiautomatic firearms is hardly innovative anymore.
That part was merely morbidly amusing (if you have my sort of twisted sense of humor). Bryan’s explanation of why Washington’s ban does not run afoul of the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling (which requires to be constitutional, a gun control law must be based in a general historical tradition) is scary. “General” meaning that isolated local laws don’t count; and “historical” meaning somewhere in the chronological neighborhood of the passage of the Second Amendment or earlier.
For an example of an applicable law, he cites local laws against carrying — not a ban on ownership — of Bowie knives not even invented until decades after the proper historical time frame. Bryan is clearly losing it.
Nay, completely lost it. Because he also cites…. Well, in his own words:
[C]omplete bans on the possession of certain weapons (as opposed to laws forbidding the carrying of those weapons) did not occur as much in our early Nation’s history because the federal and state governments did not have the “maturity, powers, tools, or resources” to implement and enforce a complete ban.
Yes, he cited nonexistent laws which he supposes would have been passed and enforced, if only the poor government had the sheer raw power to get away with it. In his mind, it seems that constitutional authority derives from tyrannical, police state force not the ratified agreed-to words of the actual document.
And I guess he figures that Washington has accumulated sufficient power now, so it’s all good.
We’ll see. If constitutional authority now comes down to who has the most guns and accurate targeting, and not the legal language of the Constitution and courts, Bryan may be putting himself out of work, retirement or no. After all, mightn’t some people decide that if might makes right, is on the side of the heaviest artillery; why not skip wasting money on court challenges and go straight to Bryan’s preferred test-by- fire-power?
This ruling was so bizarre that I wondered if his… thinking was reflected in other cases he’s heard. The very first case I found in a quick search was Tingley v. Equal Rights Washington, in which a therapist was challenging the state’s ban on “conversion therapy. Bryan ruled against Tingley.
Regardless of your personal take on “convesrion therapy” (“curing” people of homosexuality), Bryan’s rationale in this should also raise questions about his mental competence.
The prohibited conduct at issue here, performing conversion therapy, is analogous to doctor giving a prescription for marijuana because it involves engaging in a specific act designed to provide treatment. In contrast, the speech at issue in NIFLA, notice requirements that regulated the information a provider must give to its patients, is more analogous to a doctor recommending that a patient use marijuana because both consider information that a provider may discuss with a patient.
TL;DR: You can have opinions on “conversion therapy” or medical marijuana, and discuss the options with a patient. But you can no more conduct/prescribe “conversion therapy” than you could prescribe medical marijuana. Prescribing marijuana is unlawful, so “conversion therapy is unlawful. Or so Bryan thinks.
Except that in Washington, it is lawful to prescribe medical marijuana, and had been for decades when Bryan made that error-riddled ruling.
You’d think that a professionally, and mentally, competent judge could come up with a better comparison. Or at least one that wasn’t exactly the fricking opposite of what he was claiming. Considering the two cases together…
“Might makes right.” That’s one heck of a constitutional test. And I can hardly wait to see what the Ninth Circuit makes of the proposition. Do they uphold the state’s ban, or do they do a quick head count to see who has more guns and might — the state or the people — and decide accordingly?
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