Posted on 06/29/2018 6:28:49 AM PDT by Simon Green
Gun manufacturers must do their best to comply with a California law requiring new models of semiautomatic handguns to imprint their bullets with identifying micro stamps so police can trace them, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday, rejecting the companies’ arguments that the law should be overturned because compliance is technologically impossible.
A gun-control advocate said the ruling preserves safety regulations that encourage industries to develop new technologies. A gun organization’s lawyer said the state is headed for a “slow-motion handgun ban.”
The gun law, passed in 2007, is supported by police organizations that say the stamps would help officers to determine the source of bullets found at crime scenes. It requires that new brands of semiautomatic pistols introduced for retail sale in California carry markings in two places that would imprint the gun’s model and serial number on each cartridge as it is fired.
The law didn’t take effect until 2013, when the state certified that there were no patent restrictions on the technology. But gun manufacturers have not sold any new models of semiautomatic handguns in California since then, and in 2014 a gun group sued to invalidate the law, saying its standards could never be met.
A state appellate court allowed the suit to proceed, relying on an 1872 California statute that declared, “The law never requires impossibilities.” On Thursday, however, the state’s high court dismissed the suit and said the law would remain on the books, even if it was difficult to enforce.
“Impossibility can occasionally excuse noncompliance with a statute,” Justice Goodwin Liu said, since a manufacturer charged with violating the law could argue that it had done everything possible to comply. “But impossibility does not authorize a court to go beyond interpreting a statute and simply invalidate it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sfchronicle.com ...
So it is impossible to do this but it is still law. Sounds like typical California logic.
We need a law requiring stupidity tracing technology in our court “judges”. “Supreme” my @$$. Should be called the Florida Stupidity Court.
But impossibility does not authorize a court to go beyond interpreting a statute and simply invalidate it.
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But isn’t this what Brown vs. Board of Education did? It said that “separate-but-equal” was IMPOSSIBLE to achieve and thus laws enacting racial segregation of public facilities are Unconstitutional.
Maybe I’m missing something.
This can easily be overturned in the Federal Courts...although obviously not by the 9th Circus.
But impossibility does not authorize a court to go beyond interpreting a statute and simply invalidate it.”
Read that sentence twice. These people are nuts.
[So it is impossible to do this but it is still law. Sounds like typical California logic.]
This is called a “technical ban”. Require a technology that is grossly impractical or not possible and you have a defacto handgun ban. Either way it yields the desired outcome of the anti-gunners.
ML/NJ
SCOTUS has already ruled that a partial infringement is still an infringement. This law is unconstitutional but will require someone that has standing to fight it.
Right up there with regulating cow flatulence.
Has California regulated ship to ship or ship to earth transporter beams? How about replicators?
People will buy their guns and ammo ‘elsewhere’................
We’ll know we have a proper Supreme Court when a ton of state 2A infringements start getting slapped down.
Ping!.............
Given that it is impossible, this restriction amounts to “infringement” of the 2nd Amendment.
Exactly. They can’t ban guns so they will just make them horribly expensive and impossible to manufacture.
What happens if I use brass that I pick up at the range, for my reloads?
Only in lala land.
Unenforceable, won’t BE enforced, but will stay on the books.
better yet , can I just add my intials to each round?
Shouldn’t be a problem. According to the way the article is written, it is the bullet that has the identifying imprint. Not the brass.
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