Opinion ID: 5130178
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Supreme Court Rejected an Interest-

Text: Balancing Test Before turning to what Heller did, it’s important to understand what it did not do. Heller did not give lower courts license to pursue their own conception of the Second Amendment guarantee. While Heller did not answer all questions for all times, as discussed below, it provided a framework for analyzing Second Amendment issues without resorting to the familiar tiers-of-scrutiny approach. Instead DUNCAN V. BONTA 109 of recognizing this, lower courts, including our own, routinely narrow Heller and fill the supposed vacuum with their own ahistorical and atextual balancing regime. This contradicts Heller’s express instructions. The majority continues this error by reaffirming our court’s two-step Second Amendment inquiry. Maj. Op. 23– 24. Under that test, we ask two questions: (1) “if the challenged law affects conduct that is protected by the Second Amendment”; and if so, (2) we “choose and apply an appropriate level of scrutiny.” Id. (simplified). The step one inquiry often pays lip service to Heller: it asks whether the law “burdens conduct protected by the Second Amendment,” United States v. Chovan, 735 F.3d 1127, 1136 (9th Cir. 2013), “based on a historical understanding of the scope of the [Second Amendment] right,” Jackson v. City & Cnty. Of San Francisco, 746 F.3d 953, 960 (9th Cir. 2014) (simplified). To determine whether the challenged law falls outside the scope of the Amendment, we look to whether “persuasive historical evidence show[s] that the regulation [at issue] does not impinge on the Second Amendment right as it was historically understood.” Silvester v. Harris, 843 F.3d 816, 821 (9th Cir. 2016). Thus, the first step asks if the conduct is protected by the Second Amendment as a historical matter. 5 5 The majority does not bother to do the hard work of examining the historical record and merely assumes that the magazine ban infringes on the Second Amendment. Such an analytical step blinds the majority to the long historical tradition of weapons capable of firing more than ten rounds in this country and the exceptional nature of California’s ban here. Cf. Mai v. United States, 974 F.3d 1082, 1091 (Bumatay, J., 110 DUNCAN V. BONTA It is at step two where our court goes astray. Instead of ending the inquiry based on history and tradition, our court layers on a tier of scrutiny—an exercise fraught with subjective decision-making. In picking the appropriate tier, we operate a “sliding scale” depending on the severity of the infringement. Id. Practically speaking, that means putting a thumb on that scale for “intermediate scrutiny.” In over a dozen post-Heller Second Amendment cases, we have never adopted strict scrutiny for any regulation. 6 That’s because our court interprets the sliding scale to require intermediate scrutiny so long as there are “alternative channels for selfdefense.” Jackson, 746 F.3d at 961. 7 dissenting from the denial of reh’g en banc) (“By punting the analysis of the historical scope of the Second Amendment . . . , we let false assumptions cloud our judgment and distort our precedent even further from the original understanding of the Constitution.”). 6 See Young v. Hawaii, 992 F.3d 765, 773 (9th Cir. 2021) (en banc); United States v. Singh, 979 F.3d 697, 725 (9th Cir. 2020); Mai v. United States, 952 F.3d 1106, 1115 (9th Cir. 2020); United States v. Torres, 911 F.3d 1253, 1263 (9th Cir. 2019); Pena v. Lindley, 898 F.3d 969, 979 (9th Cir. 2018); Teixeira v. County of Alameda, 873 F.3d 670, 678 (9th Cir. 2017) (en banc); Mahoney v. Sessions, 871 F.3d 873, 881 (9th Cir. 2017); Bauer v. Becerra, 858 F.3d 1216, 1221 (9th Cir. 2017); Fisher v. Kealoha, 855 F.3d 1067, 1070–71 (9th Cir. 2017); Fortson v. L.A. City Attorney’s Office, 852 F.3d 1190, 1194 (9th Cir. 2017); Silvester, 843 F.3d at 827; Wilson v. Lynch, 835 F.3d 1083, 1093 (9th Cir. 2016); Peruta v. Cnty. of San Diego, 824 F.3d 919, 942 (9th Cir. 2016) (en banc); Fyock v. City of Sunnyvale, 779 F.3d 991, 999 (9th Cir. 2015); Jackson, 746 F.3d at 965; Chovan, 735 F.3d at 1138. 7 Once again, our court fails to pay attention to Heller with this type of analysis. Heller expressly says, “[i]t is no answer to say . . . that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed.” 554 U.S. at 629; see also Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411, 421 (2016) (Alito, J., DUNCAN V. BONTA 111 What’s more, we often employ a toothless “intermediate scrutiny,” upholding the regulation if it “reasonabl[y] fit[s]” the state’s asserted public-safety objective. 8 Maj. Op. 15. In other words, so long as a firearms regulation aims to achieve a conceivably wise policy measure, the Second Amendment won’t stand in its way. In effect, this means we simply give concurring) (“But the right to bear other weapons is ‘no answer’ to a ban on the possession of protected arms.”). Likewise, it is no answer to say—