Notably, the district court judge and the Second Circuit upheld the ban on the ground that the challengers failed to “provide any evidence that stun guns and tasers are in common use.” [More]
Until this gets cleared up for good, the sword will continue to be two-edged.
[Via bondmen]
Again, if we force them to actually inspect the founding era documents as required by the Bruen test(s), they will finally have to acknowledge that the words “in common use” and “sporting purposes” do not appear in any of them.
What they WILL find is citation after citation about personally owned weapons being used for militia purposes. You know, those “Second Amendment Remedy” purposes that have caused authority figures to pucker up at least as far back as Benjamin Franklin’s son’s term as a Royal Governor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Franklin
Read ’em and weep, Bill. Read ’em and weep.
This was already challenged at the SCOTUS level in 2016’s Caetano v. Massachusetts, which held that non-lethal weapons are protected under the Second Amendment. (Yes, the “in common use” test was part of it, but the ruling established that 200,000 or so owned for lawful purposes was the “common use” threshold, which is not a very high number if applied nationwide. The “in common use” test still has other problems, though.)
So the 2nd Circuit is directly defying SCOTUS precedent if it rules that stun guns and Tasers can be banned because they don’t fall under 2A protections — “in common use” notwithstanding.