Federal appeals court sends California gun litigants back to trial court, history books

A clerk shows a customer a TPM Arms LLC California-legal featureless AR-10 style.308 rifle at the company’s booth at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show at the Orange County Fairgrounds on June 5, 2021. That history standard, California’s attorneys argued in the case ruled on Wednesday, “dramatically changed the ground rules” for litigating gun laws, and therefore required the case to be reopened for the gathering of new evidence in the lower court, including from historical records. In June, the 9th Circuit sent a challenge to California’s longstanding ban on military-style rifles back to a lower court to be retried. Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, the Reagan appointee who authored the dissent, called the majority’s decision to remand the case a “failure to resolve the straightforward legal issues presented,” and one that “delays the resolution of this case, wastes judicial resources, and fails to provide guidance to the lower courts of our Circuit.” In that case, a man named George Young had been denied a permit to carry a gun in Hawaii more than a decade ago. Perhaps in a nod to concerns that remanding of such cases wastes time, it did, however, write that if either party were to appeal the lower court’s ultimate decision in the case back to the 9th Circuit once more, they could “request expedited consideration.”