A rare moment of good constitutional-law news comes to us, from all places, California. No, this does not involve the state’s lieutenant governor rushing to follow Colorado’s lead in issuing a judicial bill of attainder on Donald Trump. As our friends at Twitchy noted late yesterday, Eleni Kounalakis tried instructing Twitter on what the Constitution says without bothering to actually read it first:

The Lieutenant Governor of the largest state in the country says that according to the Constitution, the president must be 40 years old. Her name is Eleni Kounalakis and appar,ently no one ever taught her how to read. https://t.co/ebhSVEqDaI

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 20, 2023

Kounalakis had to issue a correction after getting an avalanche of ridicule over her error, but constitutional ignorance seems to be a systemic problem in California. In the wake of the Bruen decision on the constitutional right to carry, California decided to block the exercise of that right to vastly expand the definition of “sensitive places” to all but halt concealed-carry in the state.

Yesterday, US District Court Judge Cormac Carney struck down Senate Bill 2 and declared it “repugnant.” In fact, Carney accused California of being “openly defiant of the Supreme Court” in passing the bill into law, which kind of sounds … insurrectiony, no?

A new California law that would bar licensed gun holders from carrying their firearms into an array of public places will not go into full effect on Jan. 1 as scheduled, after a federal judge blocked major parts of it as unconstitutional Wednesday.

The law, Senate Bill 2, was part of a slate of new gun control measures passed this year by California Democrats in response to two things: a sweeping U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reined in gun control measures nationally last year, and several high-profile mass shootings in the state this year — including in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park.

In his decision to block the law Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that the law’s “coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

Gavin Newsom, who championed SB2 and signed it into law, used the common legal argument I’m rubber you’re glue in response:

“Defying common sense, this ruling outrageously calls California’s data-backed gun safety efforts ‘repugnant,'” Newsom said. “What is repugnant is this ruling, which greenlights the proliferation of guns in our hospitals, libraries, and children’s playgrounds — spaces which should be safe for all.”

If Newsom does run for president, can we declare him in insurrection to the Constitution and keep him off the ballots? Just asking for a couple of pals in Colorado.

More seriously, Carney scoffs at the idea that California has made any of those spaces safer, with our without SB2. In his ruling, Carney underscores the heightened concern of Californians over their personal safety in the Newsom era, and points out that self-defense is one of the key natural rights on which the Second Amendment and the Constitution are based. Those natural rights don’t disappear in playgrounds or libraries, and it’s absurd to argue that they do:

We live in dangerous times. Nearly every day, we are barraged with stories about school shootings, attacks on places of worship, and other unthinkable acts of violence and cruelty. Nor are our society’s problems limited to those acute acts of terror—daily our country faces prejudice and division of all types, economic uncertainty and poverty, a nationwide mental health crisis, and an epidemic of addiction and crime. The only hope to find in the face of such dire circumstances is that democracy, as it has up to this point, will prevail and somehow solve the challenges we face. But such hope is little comfort to individuals who, through no fault of their own, find themselves beset by an attacker and facing their death or that of their loved ones.

The right to self-defense and to defend one’s family is fundamental and inherent to our very humanity irrespective of any formal codification. In their wisdom, the Founders recognized the need for individual citizens to protect themselves and their loved ones from those that would do them harm—and they knew that such a right could not be vindicated without the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees law-abiding, responsible citizens the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense in case of confrontation.

Carney also points out the hypocrisy in California’s carry-permit regime, one of the most difficult to navigate in the nation. After forcing citizens to vault over any number of obstacles ostensibly to prevent dangerous people from gaining carry permits, Carney accuses the state of then preventing those who do pass from any meaningful exercise of those permits:

To obtain such a permit in California, a person must go through a rigorous screening process. The process includes a lengthy application, a thorough background check involving interviews, fingerprinting, and reviewing multiple government databases, and a full-day, hands-on training course in which the person must demonstrate they can safely and proficiently use the handgun they seek to carry in public. Even with those stringent requirements, California will not allow concealed carry permitholders to effectively practice what the Second Amendment promises. SB2’s coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court. The law designates twenty-six categories of places, such as hospitals, public transportation, places that sell liquor for on-site consumption, playgrounds, parks, casinos, stadiums, libraries, amusement parks, zoos, places of worship, and banks, as “sensitive places” where concealed carry permitholders cannot carry their handguns. SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a “sensitive place,” effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.

Some of the restrictions are so ambiguous as to be arbitrary and capricious. For instance, what does “public gatherings and special events” mean specifically? Category 26 is even worse:

(26) Any other privately owned commercial establishment that is open to the public, unless the operator clearly and conspicuously posts a sign indicating that licenseholders are permitted to carry firearms on the property.

This inverts the rules adopted by most other states, which presumes legal carry in privately owned commercial establishments unless specifically and expressly forbidden by the owners. The presumption in those states is that citizens can exercise their constitutional rights unless owners exercise their own private-property rights. California presumes that exercising constitutional rights is illegal unless specifically allowed, which … is not how constitutional rights work.

Even worse was SB2’s prohibition of carry in “parking areas.” Carney found that repugnant in ways that even the plaintiffs didn’t specify in their challenge:

The Court agrees that even in relation to places Plaintiffs do not challenge as sensitive, SB2’s designation of parking areas as sensitive places is inconsistent with the Second Amendment. Both Heller and McDonald describe sensitive places where carry may be prohibited using the preposition “in,” not “near” or “around.” Kopel & Greenlee, The “Sensitive Places” Doctrine, 13 Charleston L. Rev. at 291–92 (citing Amy Hetzner, Comment, Where Angels Tread: Gun-Free School Zone Laws and an Individual Right to Bear Arms, 95 Marq. L. Rev. 359 (2011)). And SB2’s designation of parking areas as sensitive places imposes a much larger burden on law-abiding citizens’ right to carry arms for self-defense in public than banning them in the sensitive places themselves.

The government argues that it may designate as sensitive parking lots associated with government buildings because “just as a private property owner may control conduct on its own land, the government holds a similar right when it operates as a proprietor.” (Opp. at 11.) But “the State is not exempt from recognizing the protections afforded to individuals by the Constitution simply because it acts on government property.”

The state of California clearly intended SB2 as an end-run around Bruen and the Second Amendment, Carney concludes. The entire law therefore has to be temporarily enjoined prior to an actual trial on the merits of these claims, he ruled, and made clear that plaintiffs will almost certainly prevail on the merits of their argument — and the constitutional demerits of Newsom et al:

CCW permitholders are among the most responsible, reliable law-abiding citizens. They have been through a vigorous vetting and training process following their application to carry a concealed handgun. The challenged SB2 provisions unconstitutionally deprive this group of their constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. Therefore, those provisions must be preliminarily enjoined.

California will undoubtedly appeal this injunction to the Ninth Circuit, but they will be looking over their own collective shoulder, Cam Edwards concludes:

The big question at the moment is whether the Ninth Circuit will let Carney’s injunction stand, or if anti-2A judges on the appellate court will play their usual games and stay his decision and allow California to begin enforcing these “sensitive places” on January 1. We’ll be talking about Carney’s decision in-depth on today’s Bearing Arms Cam & Co with Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation, as well as the other legal challenges to SB 2’s new licensing restrictions and outrageous costs and fees.

No matter what the Ninth Circuit decides, the Supreme Court will have the final say, and the California Rifle & Pistol Association, Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners of California, Liberal Gun Owners Association, Firearms Policy Coalition, Orange County Gun Owners PAC, San Diego County Gun Owners PAC, California Gun Rights Foundation, Reno May, Marco Antonio Carralero, and the other named plaintiffs who challenged these provisions deserve congratulations for their fight, and for a decision that can and will be cited going forward… including at the highest court in the land.

That will be worth watching, of course. The Ninth has actually improved slightly on such issues, but I’ll predict that this lands at SCOTUS no matter what they do with the appeal. Carney has laid out such a clear analysis of the law’s constitutional repugnance that it will be all but impossible for California to even win a temporary reprieve.