Gun owners have seen many outrageous instances of courts dismissing the importance, if not the very existence, of the individual right to keep and bear arms. But Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts still managed to distinguish himself among this dubious cohort with an opinion published on April 5. Not only the does Young’s opinion uphold an expansive ban on semiautomatic firearms and magazines by misreading Supreme Court precedent, it goes out of its way to mock the legacy and stalwart Second Amendment jurisprudence of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia. The case is Workman v. Healy. [1]
Massachusetts enacted a state law banning a variety of semiautomatic firearms and magazines in 1998. That law paralleled a federal ban on so-called “assault weapons” and “large capacity magazines” in effect from 1994 to 2004, explicating adopting the federal definition of “semiautomatic assault weapon.” The Massachusetts law accordingly banned certain firearms by name, others as “copies and duplicates” of the guns banned by name, and still others by describing a “features test” that applied to additional detachable magazine fed semiautomatic firearms.
Throughout the federal ban, manufacturers made and retailers sold magazine fed semiautomatic rifles specifically designed to comply with the terms of the federal ban. Massachusetts legislators certainly had notice that such firearms were available and considered federally compliant when they enacted the state’s own law four years after the enactment of the federal law. The reference to the federal law in Massachusetts’ own statute made it clear to all for nearly 20 years that rifles which were available during the federal ban were also legal in Massachusetts.
Nevertheless, on July 20, 2016 – weeks after a highly-publicized mass murder at an Orlando, Florida
