Opinion ID: 5130178
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Majority Takes Our Circuit’s “Heightened”

Text: Scrutiny to a New Low. I’ve observed before how, for Second Amendment cases, our circuit has “watered down the ‘reasonable fit’ prong of intermediate scrutiny to little more than rational basis review,” starting by borrowing an inapt test from the First Amendment context and then weakening it with each passing case upholding government restrictions. Mai, 974 F.3d at 1101–04 (VanDyke, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc). This case furthers that trend. Instead of “demand[ing] a closer regulatory fit for a law that directly burdens a fundamental right,” our en banc court fails to apply any “real heightened scrutiny, or even just faithfully appl[y] the [heightened scrutiny] test as articulated in” comparable First Amendment jurisprudence. Id. at 1104. 2 To be clear, I think Judge Bumatay has penned an exemplary dissent addressing “text, tradition, and history.” My objection is not that judges cannot do good analysis under this framework, but rather that without a more bright-line test there is far too much opportunity for manipulation, especially with a right as unpopular with some judges as the Second Amendment. 3 See David B. Kopel & Joseph G.S. Greenlee, The Federal Circuits’ Second Amendment Doctrines, 61 ST. LOUIS U.L.J. 193, 303 (2017) (“Bright-line rules declaring certain government actions categorically unconstitutional, without the need for a means/ends test, are common in constitutional law. They are found in the First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Eighth Amendment, Tenth Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment.”) (footnotes omitted). DUNCAN V. BONTA 149 Indeed, notwithstanding our court’s early commitment that “we are . . . guided by First Amendment principles” in applying the Second Amendment, Jackson v. City & Cnty. of San Francisco, 746 F.3d 953, 961 (9th Cir. 2014), it is telling that comparisons between the First and Second Amendment in this latest case have largely been dropped by the majority and relegated to concurring opinions—likely because it gets embarrassing and wearisome to constantly rationalize why we treat the Second Amendment so differently than its close constitutional neighbor. In analyzing whether California’s magazine ban violates the Second Amendment, the majority here follows a now well-traveled path. It starts like many of our Second Amendment cases: by assuming, instead of deciding, that the Second Amendment even applies to California’s ban. See, e.g., Mai v. United States, 952 F.3d 1106, 1114–15 (9th Cir. 2020); Pena v. Lindley, 898 F.3d 969, 976 (9th Cir. 2018); Fyock v. City of Sunnyvale, 779 F.3d 991, 997 (9th Cir. 2015). 4 This itself is very telling. It emphasizes the practical 4 The majority claims that the current two-step inquiry “faithfully adheres” to Heller, since “history, text, and tradition greatly inform step one of the analysis . . . .” But this only illustrates my point about the malleability of our current framework. Our court consistently uses step one of our test to either: (1) wade through the complicated history to conclude the regulation does not burden conduct protected by the Second Amendment at all, see, e.g., Young v. Hawaii, 992 F.3d 765, 785 (9th Cir. 2021) (en banc) (“As we might expect in this area, fraught with strong opinions and emotions, history is complicated, and the record is far from uniform.”); or (2) as here, side-step this inquiry altogether by assuming the conduct implicates the Second Amendment, only to uphold the regulation at step two by applying an extremely loose balancing test (more on that below). It’s clear that history, text, and tradition is currently comatose in our circuit’s jurisprudence enforcing the Second Amendment—we only rely on it when deemed useful to support the 150 DUNCAN V. BONTA vacuity of the second step in our court’s two-step test. The reason it is so effortless for our court to “assume” that the Second Amendment applies is because the plaintiff will always lose at our court’s step-two intermediate scrutiny. If we genuinely applied any form of heightened scrutiny, we would have to be more careful and concise about what activity or item warrants protection under the Second Amendment. And something is wrong when most of our court’s judges can’t bring themselves to say the Second Amendment actually covers anything beyond a Heller-style total handgun ban. It’s the judicial equivalent of holding your nose. After the majority here assumes that California’s magazine ban “implicates” the Second Amendment at step one of our test, at step two it concludes that banning the most commonly purchased magazine used in handguns for selfdefense only places a “small burden” on the exercise of the right to bear arms and thus only intermediate scrutiny applies. And by this point we all know what that means: the regulation burdening the citizens’ Second Amendment rights always wins under our version of Second Amendment “intermediate scrutiny.” Repeatedly characterizing the legislation as a “minimal burden,” the majority decries any possible need for the banned magazines and relies heavily on the rarity of their full use in self-defense, while giving no weight to the effectiveness of such magazines in selfdefense.