By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A conservative U.S. appeals court judge took the unusual step on Thursday of recording himself handling several handguns and explaining their mechanisms to explain why his colleagues had wrongly upheld a California law banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who was on Republican President Donald Trump’s shortlist for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination in his first term, said he hoped through the video to show how a lack of familiarity with firearms had resulted in a flawed 7-4 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“It occurred to me that in this instance, showing is much more effective than telling,” VanDyke said. “As the old saying goes, a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. And here, I hope you will agree that a video is at least worth that much.”
Legal experts said they were unaware of any federal judge issuing a video with a ruling, which his colleague U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, in a concurring opinion said was “wildly improper” and amounted to casting himself as an expert witness.
John Collins, a law professor at George Washington University, said the video of a gun-toting judge with a rifle mounted on the wall could be appealing to Trump, who appointed VanDyke in his first term.
“I suspect it is an effort to audition for elevation to the Supreme Court, should a vacancy occur in the near future,” Collins said.
VanDyke did not respond to a request for comment.
In the long-running lawsuit, the California Rifle & Pistol Association and gun owners argued that the Democratic-led state’s ban on large-capacity magazines violated the right to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.
A federal judge in San Diego in 2023 agreed, citing a landmark ruling by the 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court a year earlier that held that firearms restrictions be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” to pass muster.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, appealed, and on Thursday, the appeals court concluded the law comported with the Second Amendment because magazines are accessories, not “arms,” and fell within the historical tradition of protecting innocent people from “especially dangerous uses of weapons.”
“A large-capacity magazine has little function in armed self-defense, but its use by mass shooters has exacerbated the harm of those horrific events,” U.S. Circuit Judge Graber, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, wrote.
VanDyke dissented, writing in an opinion that the majority was relying on “its invented ‘arms–accessory’ distinction as an on/off switch for fundamental constitutional protections.”
To prove his point, he included a link to a video of himself handling several handguns and explaining their mechanisms to show how the majority “lacked the basic familiarity with firearms to understand the inherent shortcomings” with its rulings.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Richard Chang)
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