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Issue
Whether San Francisco’s law requiring homeowners or residents to keep handguns stored in locked containers, or effectively disabled with trigger locks, unless carried on one’s person, violates the plaintiffs’ right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Secondly, whether San Francisco’s law prohibiting the sale of “non-sporting,” expanding, or fragmenting ammunition violates the plaintiffs’ right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Facts
Espanola Jackson was a 76-year-old lady in San Francisco who wanted to keep a handgun readily available for self-defense in her home. San Francisco’s Safe Storage Law, however, required that the firearm, unless carried on her person, must be kept in a locked container or rendered incapable of being fired by means of a trigger-lock device. Espanola explained that should she need to protect herself in the middle of the night from violent intruders, this law would require her to “turn on the light, find [her] glasses, find the key to the lockbox, insert the key in the lock and unlock the box under the stress of an emergency, and then get [her] gun before being in position to defend [herself].”
The other plaintiffs were also handgun owners and citizens of San Francisco “who presently intend to keep their handguns within the home in a manner ready for immediate use to protect themselves and their families.” One was an 84-year-old man who explained he had physical difficulty unlocking trigger devices. In addition to their arguments against the Safe Storage Law, they charged that the vague prohibition on the sale of ammunition that “serves no sporting purpose,” or that which fragments or expands upon impact, abrogates their right to buy ammunition designed specifically for self-defense. They pointed out that police use such ammunition because of its superior ability to stop violent criminals.
The National Rifle Association and the San Francisco Veteran Police Officers Association sued the city and county of San Francisco on behalf of residents and handgun owners Espanola Jackson et al., challenging the constitutionality of “The Safe Storage Law” and the “Prohibiting Sale of Particularly Dangerous Ammunition” law.
Court Below
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California was the first to hear the case on September 27, 2011. San Francisco motioned to dismiss the case because gun owners lacked standing and that their claims were not ripe. The court denied their motion.
Jackson v. San Francisco, 829 F.Supp.2d 867 N.D., Cal. 2011
The district court heard the case again on August 17, 2012, and Jackson motioned for judgment on the pleadings. Here, she was motioning that this case was similar to that of District of Columbia v. Heller 2008 and McDonald v. City of Chicago 2010 and should be ruled accordingly, in favor of the gun owners. Agreeing with San Francisco, the district court denied Jackson’s motion.
Jackson v. San Francisco, No. C 09-2143 RS N.D., Cal. 2012
Jackson appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in favor of San Francisco and upheld both laws on March 25, 2014.
Jackson v. San Francisco, No. 12-17803 9th Cir. 2014
The plaintiffs petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. The petition was denied June 8, 2015, with Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, dissenting from the denial.
Jackson v. San Francisco, 576 U.S. 2015
Question before the Ninth Circuit:
“This appeal raises the question whether two of San Francisco’s firearm and ammunition regulations, which limit but do not destroy Second Amendment rights, are constitutional.”
CCJ filed an amicus curiae in support of Jackson
Summary:
In District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects a pre-existing, fundamental, and individual human right to keep and bear arms, and McDonald v. City of Chicago 2010 incorporated the Second Amendment into the 14th Amendment, making it applicable to the states. It may not be infringed by either the national or state governments unless there is a “compelling state interest.” There is no such interest in this case. The plaintiffs simply want the means to exercise their right to protect themselves, a right that includes armed self-defense inside and outside of the home.
The right to keep and bear arms has a strong historical foundation in the United States and in Western civilization in general. In The Athenian Constitution Aristotle wrote of how Pisistratus’ disarming of the Athenians was key to his establishment of tyranny. Stuart monarchs in 17th-century England used select militias to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming them.
Western thinkers who influenced the Founders understood the right as essential for the preservation of liberty. Both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes argued the right to use force in self-defense is necessary to protect natural rights such as self-preservation. Cicero maintained natural law dictates that “if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.”
There is no doubt the Founders believed in a right to armed self-defense. The right was expressed in the early state constitutions of Pennsylvania, Vermont, Indiana, Mississippi, Connecticut, Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio. Also, even though many advocates of the new United States Constitution assured the people that Congress would have no power to interfere with the right to keep and bear arms, as it was a limited government possessing only those powers given to it, many state ratifying conventions recommended the addition of an amendment expressly protecting the individual right to keep and bear arms. This right was subsequently enshrined in the Second Amendment.
The Ninth Circuit is holding the San Francisco law to an improper level of scrutiny. The Ninth Circuit is applying intermediate scrutiny to San Francisco’s laws, despite the Supreme Court’s long recognition that the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights are best protected by enhanced judicial scrutiny. Legally the government must overcome great hurdles to justify the infringement of such rights. In Heller, the Supreme Court categorically rejected the low-level “rational basis” review, and it rejected Justice Breyer’s form of an intermediate scrutiny test for laws infringing on the right to bear arms. Although some Circuit Courts have attempted to maintain intermediate scrutiny for laws outside “the core” of the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court rejected exactly that type of analysis for First Amendment cases—and in Heller, the Supreme Court likened the First and Second Amendments. Just like laws touching on the First Amendment, laws regarding Second Amendment issues should be held to a high level of judicial scrutiny to help protect fundamental individual rights.
In Heller the Court cited with approval a state court ruling that to require “arms to be so borne as to render them wholly useless for the purpose of defense, would be clearly unconstitutional.” The Safe Storage Law does just that. Prohibiting easy access to a handgun, if one is confronted in the night with an intruder, renders the gun “wholly useless” for self-defense. Also, the ban on expanding ammunition makes the gun less effective for self-defense. It is no more constitutional than an ordinance limiting the subject matter of the topics covered in newspapers.
The Court is called on to apply traditional strict scrutiny to regulations that infringe on a fundamental human right. As the Court in Heller noted, “Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or yes even future judges think that scope too broad.”
Final Outcome
The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of San Francisco. Jackson appealed to the Supreme Court, which denied a hearing.
Although the Supreme Court denied Jackson’s writ of certiorari, Justice Thomas, joined by Scalia, wrote a dissenting opinion on the denial.
Thomas agreed with CCJ’s argument that the Second Amendment protects the fundamental right to self-defense and that “Second Amendment rights are no less protected by our Constitution than other rights enumerated in that document.” Although Thomas did not cite the “natural right” to self-defense as understood by philosophers such as Locke, he noted that the Second Amendment codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors.”
Also, Thomas noted that the 9th Circuit’s decision “is in serious tension with Heller.” The Court had held in Heller that the government cannot ban handguns in the home, and the unconstitutional trigger-lock requirements prevent residents from “rendering their firearms ‘operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.’” San Francisco’s trigger-lock requirement essentially does the same since it requires the attachment of a trigger-lock when the firearm is off of the person’s body.
Similar to CCJ’s scrutiny argument, Thomas noted the Ninth Circuit erroneously concluded that because San Francisco’s trigger-lock requirement was not as “severe” as the laws struck down in Washington, D.C., the burden on the rights of the San Francisco gun owners was not enough to prohibit the law. “[W]hen a law burdens a constitutionally protected right,” he wrote, “we have generally required a higher showing [of scrutiny] than the Court of Appeals demanded here.”
See Thomas’s full opinion in the “Court Below” section above.
