A technology that allows law enforcement investigators to trace spent cartridges left at crime scenes to the weapons from which they were fired is at the center of a legal battle in California that could help determine what, if any, restrictions state and local governments can still impose on handguns.
Under California’s Unsafe Handgun Act, all semi-automatic handguns that were not on the state’s approved handgun roster before 2010 are now barred from the roster unless they are equipped with the technology, which “microstamps” the weapon’s make, model and serial number on the cartridge when a bullet is discharged.
Supporters of microstamping say it is exactly the type of gun safety regulation that the Supreme Court endorsed in the landmark Second Amendment case known as Heller v. District of Columbia. The court overturned the district’s ban on the possession of handguns but left the door open for regulations that “do not remotely burden the right of self-defense.”
In a case now pending before a federal judge in Sacramento, gun-rights groups have challenged microstamping and other requirements of the UHA as an indirect and unconstitutional attempt to ban handguns.
“[T]he Second Amendment’s guarantee that individuals have access to the traditional tools of self-defense means little if the state can dictate rare or even hypothetical features into firearm designs,” the Second Amendment Foundation and the Calguns Foundation said in asking U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller to strike the law down.
Microstamping, they contend, “is, for all intents and purposes, more a piece of science fiction than commercial reality.”
The California Legislature enacted the UHA in 1999 in response to safety concerns over the proliferation of low-cost, cheaply made handguns. The law established the approved gun roster and prohibits the manufacture or sale of any “unsafe” handgun in California. To be considered safe, a weapon must include safety features such as a chamber load indicator and a magazine disconnect mechanism.
The microstamping requirement, which was added to the law in 2010, became effective in May.
“This new technology … will provide important investigative leads in solving gun-related crimes by allowing law enforcement personnel to quickly identify information about the handgun from spent cartridge casings found at the crime scene,” a California appeals court has found.
The key issue before Judge Mueller is whether microstamping and the UHA’s other provisions fall within what the Supreme Court in Heller defined as lawful gun regulations.
Gun-rights groups and others say guns that do not microstamp are nonetheless among those “in common use for lawful purposes” that the Supreme Court found were protected under the Second Amendment.
California has inverted “the common-use standard by requiring features not commonly found in pistols to be incorporated into all new model pistols,” the gun maker Glock Inc. said in a brief supporting the gun-rights groups.
But the state argues the UHA is constitutional because it is not a “blanket restriction” on a class of firearms, and that gun owners do not have a “constitutional right to purchase any handgun of one’s choice regardless of its [safety] features.”
California’s roster of approved handguns now includes more than 1,200 different types. The state points out that there have been about 1.5 million gun transactions in California since gun-rights groups filed their lawsuit in 2009.