Kostas Moros Profile picture
Feb 22, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Just filed our final responsive brief in Duncan. Benitez should rule on this in the coming weeks.

Some highlights in this thread, starting with how the state basically threw everything at the wall, because it had no historical law to point to pertaining to magazine capacity.
The State tried to straddle the line on whether or not magazines are arms, arguing that while some magazine is necessary for many firearms to function, it doesn't need to be one of over ten rounds. And because of that, the Second Amendment is not implicated at all.
This is a brazen attempt by the government to re-insert interest balancing under the guise of a plain text analysis.
Trying to sneak in Sweeney and Tucker's declarations from other cases was a lame move. And the latter, Colonel Tucker, is a joke.
"14 or more killed" is a very strange metric indeed. I bet the State's lawyers saw that there was a mass shooting with 13 killed that didn't involved so-called "LCMs", so they set the line at 14. But according to the reporting, the Parkland shooter used ten round magazines too.
If states had regulated repeating arms when they came onto the scene, California would have had a great analogue. But they didn't.
Because they didn't, the State bizarrely argues that some of the most iconic guns of the era were uncommon. K.
A common refrain from the State is that "experts" like Saul Cornell should be allowed to tell us what laws the founders would have accepted. This is utter BS.
We basically always insert something like this now so @fourboxesdiner doesn't yell at us 🤣
Read the brief in full here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

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More from @MorosKostas

Apr 30
A short thread on the GOA/GOF reply brief. Image
Prepared by the excellent @Stambo2A, Rob Olson, and Oliver Krawczyk. We work with them on several cases and it is always a pleasure.
@Stambo2A On top of all this, it also is of no benefit to anyone for trial to proceed on the Seventh Circuit's erroneous test. At minimum, if the Court won't resolve this now, they should kick it back to 7COA with instructions to scrap their garbage "military" test. Image
Read 9 tweets
Mar 16
Disappointing, if not at all unexpected decision. I’m not doing a full thread right now, but some especially erroneous portions.

Such as claiming that Teter said something outlandish and out of step, when it’s actually what THE SUPREME COURT SAID. Teter was just quoting the Supreme Court, as this acknowledges by mentioning (but ignoring) Heller. Incredible.Image
There is no other right in the original Bill of Rights for which the “operative period” is the reconstruction era.

Paging @fourboxesdiner Image
@fourboxesdiner Given I won’t have many nice things to say about this ruling, I’ll praise this footnote. Image
Read 20 tweets
Mar 8
California has filed its reply in May and Carralero, so here's a thread on some of my thoughts.

You can read it here:

Starting off, I won't speak for the Carralero plaintiffs, but our point was that such security is an indication of what government truly considers to be sensitive, as opposed to things it claims in bad faith are sensitive in order to restrict carry.drive.google.com/file/d/1hs8JXk…Image
Bruen demands representative historical laws. If there are only a few outliers, then they are not representative of our historical tradition. Image
I don't even know what to tell them here besides to go read Bruen.

This seems to just be adopting the Second Circuit's poor analysis that Bruen doesn't apply unless the violation is blatant, or something. Image
Read 20 tweets
Mar 7
Circuit Courts could not give less of a shit that the Supreme Court said interest balancing analysis is not appropriate. They are doing it anyway, and blatantly.

Will SCOTUS do anything about it?
Image
All their historical analogues are from the 20th century, except for bowie knife laws. But those were carry laws, not possession bans. Image
This is so misleading. Lots of states had concealed carry restrictions on bowie knives and other weapons, yes. A few taxed them. One or two banned sales. But as David Kopel explained in his article on this topic, no state banned bowie knife possession by the end of the 19th century.Image
Read 5 tweets
Feb 22
The first of the three CRPA vs. LASD oppositions is in, from La Verne. Two more expected today from LASD and the Attorney General.

Granted I have my bias, but I am not impressed with this brief in the least. They cite almost no caselaw to support them, and their argument boils down to "other cities are doing it so we can too!".

On the psych exam, they don't address any of the points we made about why this particular exam is especially abusive, requiring a drive of an hour each way, only on weekdays.
The DOJ brief is in now too, and I'm still reading through it, but it's interesting that they spend a lot of time justifying the idea of permits as a concept. That's not really our argument here. their point seems to be that local regulation is allowed, but California doesn't even provide a pathway for nonresidents to get a permit, let alone honor permits of other states.
Additionally, when you read through the historical examples of local permitting laws in the Spitzer declaration, almost all pertained only to concealed carry only. And all were from after the civil war.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 16
As is often the case with a shooting that breaks into the national debate, we already see celebrities, media elites, and others lining up to talk down to conservatives about how heartless they are being for not passing more gun laws.

To understand this apparent conservative intransigence on guns, you have to be aware of a few points:

1. Conservatives do not have any power in most large cities. Kansas City, for example, has had only Democrat mayors since 1930, save for one exception who left office back in 1991. Given these cities have completely rejected them politically, conservatives don't feel particularly responsible for their plight.

2. Much of Hollywood hates conservatives and makes that clear. Being a conservative usually means making peace with the fact that most of the artists and other famous people you enjoy following despise your beliefs. Not all, to be sure, but a very large amount.

3. Conservative voters are often not particularly wealthy, with a number of rural towns struggling a lot in recent years. Drugs have become a major problem, as have deaths of despair more generally.

4. They've watched in horror as more and more cities have increasingly let criminals walk with little or no consequences. They also saw rioters go completely unpunished in 2020 because they were rioting for "the right reasons".

5. They increasingly do not identify with the prevailing values of many large cities, which they see as immoral and irresponsible.

6. They've always had guns, and lots of them. They grew up with them and are comfortable around them. There can be problems with guns, namely as a tool for suicide. But murder with them is rare.

So poverty, drugs, resentment, and lots of guns. According to the gun control orthodoxy, this should equate to a bloodbath, right?

Wrong.

Take Missouri as an example. It had 629 gun-related homicides in 2022, a dismal number. But 474 of those were in just two major cities - St. Louis and Kansas City. Dozens of smaller counties did not have a single homicide of any kind, gun-related or otherwise.

If Kansas City and St. Louis combined to form their own state with their two million total people, they'd have a gun-related homicide rate of 23.7 per 100,000 people. The rest of Missouri, with a remaining population of over four million people? 3.7 per 100,000. About six times less.

So popular culture, famous athletes and the major media come demanding of these people that they have to curtail their own rights, because cities in which they have no power can't get their shit together? When the leaders of those cities constantly talk down to them and despise them, no less?

Why would you expect these conservative-leaning populations to listen to your lectures? You've accepted none of their ideas, you've tried the same thing over and over for decades, and the resulting high violent crime is, to them, entirely predictable.

We've seen that it doesn't have to be this way. Look at what Mayor Suarez, one of the few Republican big city mayors, has accomplished in Miami.

Contrary to racist views that success in big cities are limited to those that are very white, Miami is a very diverse city where white people make up less than half the population. It also had a horrifyingly violent past in relatively recent history ("The Year of Dangerous Days" by Nicholas Griffin is quite a good read on that topic). In 1980, homicides in the city reached an astonishing 220 dead.

Last year, Miami had 31 homicides. That's the lowest in its history. In 1947, the first year they counted, it had 32, and the population back then was much lower than today. This is in a state that enacted constitutional carry recently too, for all those who warned that too would be a disaster. It hasn't been a problem.

So quit lecturing conservatives, quit demanding others compromise their rights, and quit voting for the same failed leadership pushing the same trash ideologies of government dependence, tolerance for criminality, and failure.

The continued devastation seen in cities like Kansas City is the CHOICE of its voters. And until they make a different one, they have only themselves to blame.Image
Read 4 tweets

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