San Francisco Ban Overturned; City Appeals
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
San Francisco anti-gunners suffered a staggering loss June 12 when Superior Court Judge James Warren ruled the city’s gun ban under the Proposition H referendum, passed last November, was illegal because it ran afoul of the state’s authority to regulate firearms.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera announced a day later that the city would appeal Warren’s decision.
“I respectfully disagree with the court’s reasoning,” Herrera said in a statement, “and believe that San Francisco voters acted within their authority to restrict handgun possession and firearm sales within the limits of their own City.”
Warren’s 30-page ruling was a big win for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), National Rifle Association (NRA), Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA) and California Association of Firearms Retailers (CAFR), all of which were plaintiffs in the lawsuit that sought to overturn the onerous measure, along with several individual citizens. The San Francisco Veteran Police Officers Association also joined in the court action. Proposition H was passed by 58% of the city’s voters, but Warren’s decision essentially nullified the vote.
Anti-gun Supervisor Chris Daly, who sponsored the measure, was quoted by The San Francisco Chronicle asserting that Warren “sided with the powerful gun lobby against the safety of San Franciscans.”
A spokesman for Herrera said his boss was “disappointed that the court has denied the right of voters to enact a reasonable, narrowly tailored restriction on the possession of handguns.”
Conversely, SAF founder Alan Gottlieb, who had threatened more than a year ago to take the city to court if the measure passed, put a different perspective on the case.
“The right of citizens to be safe in their homes and communities can never be subject to a popular vote,” said Gottlieb. “This ruling shows that the politicians who pushed this gun ban were wrong.”
Chris Cox, executive director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, called Warren’s ruling a major victory for freedom and the rights of law-abiding residents in the city of San Francisco.”
“It seems evident that the authors of this measure either intentionally misled voters during the election or authored this proposed measure with gross disregard of California law,” Cox said. “Regrettably, the biggest losers were the voters in this municipality who had to bear the considerable financial burden to satisfy the careless political whim of their elected officials.”
In a blistering reaction to the city’s planned appeal, Gottlieb said Daly should pay all the city’s legal costs out of his own pocket.
“If he has any conscience at all,” said Gottlieb, “Chris Daly would dig into his own pocket and compensate the city for every penny it will spend defending this outrageous measure.”
Both SAF and NRA vowed that they will work to prevent this kind of measure from happening again.
Not surprisingly, after an initial blitz of information in the hours after the judge’s ruling, California news outlets either buried the story inside newspapers or at the bottom of their news casts, or ignored it altogether.
In his ruling, the judge noted that the state penal code preempts a major section of Proposition H that banned the sale and purchase of firearms and ammunition. Current state law “provides that citizens may ‘purchase, own, possess, keep or carry’ handguns in their homes and offices.”
He further stated that “A complete ban on the sale of guns and ammunition necessarily would render a citizen’s right to purchase handguns illusory, since citizens typically come to possess a handgun by buying it.”
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