A US appeals court ruled on Friday that California’s ban on openly carrying firearms in most parts of the state was unconstitutional.
A panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided 2-1 with a gun owner in ruling that the state’s prohibition against open carry in counties with more than 200,000 people violated the US Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
About 95 per cent of the population in California, which has had some of the nation’s strictest gun-control laws, lives in counties of that size.
US Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who was appointed by Republican President Donald Trump, said the Democratic-led state’s law could not stand under the US Supreme Court’s 2022 landmark gun rights ruling.
That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, was issued by the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority and established a new legal test for firearms restrictions. The test said they must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”.
VanDyke, whose opinion on Friday was joined by another Trump appointee, said the latest case “unquestionably involves a historical practice – open carry – that predates ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791”.
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