A Federal Judge Overturned California’s Assault Weapons Ban—and Likened AR-15s to Swiss Army Knives

The Bush appointee called the rifles “a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A federal judge overturned California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons Friday—and, in his ruling, compared AR-15s to a Swiss army knife, “a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”

California had previously banned assault weapons since 1989. The law was challenged in a 2019 lawsuit by California resident James Miller and a political action committee called the San Diego County Gun Owners.

Despite California’s ban on assault rifles, they’ve been accessible in other parts of the country and have risen in popularity. Judge Roger T. Benitez, a Bush-era appointee in the US District Court for the Southern District of California, tried to use that as a partial justification for his order, writing that weapons banned by California’s law were not “bazookas, howitzers or machine guns,” but “fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

“This case is about what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment,” Benitez wrote. California consistently ranks among the states with the lowest rates of gun deaths.

Benitez said that he has granted a 30-day stay of the ruling, giving California Attorney General Rob Bonta time to appeal. “Today’s decision is fundamentally flawed,” Bonta said in a news release, “and we will be appealing it.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also criticized Benitez’s ruling, calling it a “disgusting slap” in the face of those affected by gun violence and “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians.”

“The fact that this judge compared the AR-15—a weapon of war that’s used on the battlefield—to a Swiss army knife completely undermines the credibility of this decision,” Newsom said in a statement.

California first banned assault rifles just months after a shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, in which a gunman shot and killed five children and wounded dozens of others. Since then, AR-15–style rifles have been used in other mass shootings, including the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, in which Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate