Thread by @mjs_DC

It bears repeating that Judge Benitez's ruling against California's assault weapon ban promotes the anti-vax lie that COVID vaccines are killing many people—while falsely trivializing mass shootings with an AR-15 as "infinitesimally rare." d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…

The portion of Benitez's opinion blithely trivializing the unique trauma of gunshot wounds from assault weapons is particularly nauseating.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Note, too, Benitez's contradictory conclusion: Mass shootings with assault weapons are "infinitesimally rare" in California, yet California's assault weapons ban is a "failed experiment which does not achieve its objectives of preventing mass shootings." d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…

Then there is this perverse section, in which Benitez scolds California for maintaining its assault weapons ban when large-capacity magazine bans are allegedly more effective.

California passed a large-capacity magazine ban, and Benitez blocked it.
slate.com/news-and-polit…

Benitez rejects California's extensive evidence that assault weapons are unnecessary for home defense, claiming it "fails the scientific method," then drops completely unsupported conjectures like this one to support his own conclusion. d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…

Benitez insists that "citizen militias are not irrelevant," citing the experiences of ... Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and the Taliban. d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…

Doing some bizarre back-of-the-envelope math, Benitez calculates that "7,700 women may not have been raped" if they had "been armed with an assault weapon" from just 2003 to 2007. d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…

I keep coming back to this appalling trivialization of mass shootings—Benitez seriously questions whether innocent civilians getting slaughtered with an assault weapon constitutes "real harm" for constitutional purposes. d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/firearmspolicy…