Fresno lawyer asks: What’s more important, a child’s life or right to an assault weapon?
I clerked for a federal judge in Fresno from 1990-92. You probably have never heard of that judge, the late Honorable Edward “Dean” Price, but you should. An avid duck hunter from Modesto, he was the judge who upheld the constitutionality of the assault weapons ban after the horrific 1988 Stockton school shooting.
The ban lapsed in 1993, but not before I saw on his desk death threats against him by Nazis. This ban did not ban all guns, as the National Rifle Association and now the GOP have spread such a myth as part of their marketing. Former California Sen. Barbara Boxer,who spoke at a Fresno County Democratic Women’s Club event, had published a booklet of which weapons were and which weapons were not included by the ban, educating all Californians.
Within the last month, two out of the three judges on the influential 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, appointed by former President Trump, upheld the rights of young men to buy assault weapons without getting licenses. In other words, they ignored Judge Price’s precedent weeks before the Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, mass shootings.
The Ninth Circuit decision can be used across the country as authority for justifying more assault weapon purchases, and, predictably and tragically, more killing of innocent children.
Note too that conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1991 called the interpretation by the NRA and its enablers of the few words in the Second Amendment, “a well-regulated militia” as justification for why 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds can buy assault weapons, “the biggest fraud on Americans. I repeat the word fraud.”
Another name you should know is Joshua Koskoff, the attorney representing the Sandy Hook, Connecticut families after 20 children and six staff members were murdered on Dec. 14,2012 with an assault weapon purchased by the 2O-year-old assassin’s mother (who he killed).
Koskoff successfully sued the gun manufacturer, Remington Arms, winning a $73 million settlement. Using earlier suits against big tobacco as templates to win, Gov. Gavin Newsom has vowed to sue gun manufacturers like Koskoff did. He also came to our FCDWC fundraiser as lieutenant governor, feeling out a run for governor in 2010.
During discovery, Koskoff found that in 2005, internal emails revealed Remington Arms sales were 100,000, but by 2012, sales were 2.1 million, Thus, he proved a cause and effect correlation between the company’s internet marketing around the world of AK-15s and the school shooting.
At the press conference in Uvalde after 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed by an AK-15 on May 24, Republican Texas Gov. Abbott and his cronies claimed that assault weapons have been around for 70 years, so that the increase of mass shootings could only be due to an increase of mental health problems exacerbated by the pandemic.
Yet, he conveniently forgot that the first mass shooting that started it all was 54 years ago at the University of Texas clock tower — a shooting by a lone gunman who killed 14 people, including an unborn baby, and injured 3l others in 96 minutes.
It’s not as if other countries don’t have mental illness. But the United States has 400 million guns, more than our population of 330 million. Abbott has signed some of the most insane gun laws ever: You can take guns into mental institutions, you don’t need to pass a background check or learn how to shoot a gun, you can be 18 to buy an assault weapon of war, even though you’re not old enough to buy a beer, you can open carry in churches ... they go on and on.
Texan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott at the press conference for his hypocritical love of military-style weapons and banal platitudes. Abbott’s lieutenant governor immediately cussed O’Rourke out and yelled to have him removed by security.
Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks, and a majority of Republicans support the ban of assault weapons. The GOP has ignored the polling because of the gun manufacturers’ lobbyists. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) took $13 million from the NRA.
Despite the slaughter in Uvalde, Abbott wouldn’t say if he would attend the annual NRA convention in Houston three days later. Beto said what many of us parents are feeling: Isn’t the right of our children to live more important than the right of civilians to own an assault weapon meant only for war that can take their lives away and traumatize their classmates in seconds?
