Bet you didn’t hear about this on the news did you?

Municipalities can’t ban people from owning handguns, court rules

San Francisco’s ban on handguns, blocked by a legal challenge since voters approved it in November 2005, suffered a possibly fatal blow Wednesday when a state appeals court ruled that local governments have no authority under California Law to prevent people from owning pistols.

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed with a June 2006 ruling by Superior Court Judge James Warren, who said state laws regulating gun sales, permits and safety leave no room for a city or county to forbid handgun possession.

State courts have upheld some local restrictions, including prohibitions on the sale or possession of guns on public fairgrounds, Presiding Justice Ignazio Ruvolo noted in the 3-0 ruling. But in general, “when it comes to regulating firearms, local governments are well advised to tread lightly,” he wrote.

San Francisco’s ban was challenged by the National Rifle Association, whose lobbyist Chris Cox called Wednesday’s ruling “a big win for the law-abiding citizens and NRA members of San Francisco.”

Alexis Thompson, spokeswoman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the ruling  was disappointing, “particularly in light of the continuing plague of handgun violence here in San Francisco.”

About that…so tell me, would the hand gun ban stop the violence?  No.  The fact is that using a handgun for violence is already a crime, so outlawing peaceful ownership is absolutely pointless.  Banning their guns from people who already are using them criminally is unlikely to have a measurable impact.

The city could ask the state Supreme Court to review the case. History would not be on the city’s side, however, as the state’s high court refused to review a 1982 ruling by the same appeals court striking down an earlier San Francisco ordinance that prohibited handgun possession in the city limits.

We shall see.  Newsbusters says:

While this is a state law struck down on state constitutional grounds, not the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it is a major victory for gun rights advocates — in a liberal Democratic state no less — in a presidential election year in which the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing a 2nd Amendment case in March (District of Columbia v. Heller).

Yet while the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bob Egelko covered the story on January 10, I’m having trouble finding any coverage elsewhere in the media. When searching Nexis, I found no coverage of the San Francisco gun ban story in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, nor broadcast networks ABC, CBS, or NBC.

I did find it at Rueters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0962828620080110

Still, an almost perfect whitewash of a serious liberal defeat.  Of course, San Francisco wants to spread those San Francisco values a bit further:

Meanwhile, as the Chronicle’s Egelko noted in a January 14 story, San Francisco’s district attorney has filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing the District of Columbia in its appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the District’s 1976 handgun ban:

Prosecutors led by the district attorneys of San Francisco and New York are urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to recognize a broad individual right to gun ownership that could endanger state and local firearms laws.

The court is preparing to hear arguments in March on the constitutionality of a Washington, D.C., ban on handgun possession, with a ruling due by the end of June. A federal appeals court ruled last March that the ban violated the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms - the first time a gun-control law had been struck down on that basis.

Last week the MSM were obsessed with the supposed sea change in the Democratic race with Clinton’s “comeback” in New Hampshire, and, to be fair, the primary race rightly was topic A in the news last week.

Yet the fact that the MSM are not tracking legal and political developments in what could well prove to be a sleeper issue this election season just goes to show the MSM’s deficiencies in tracking issues of political substance. The fact that Democrats have been gun shy of pushing gun control for fear of being trounced at the polls by 2nd Amendment-supporting voters could also explain the media’s reticence about reporting on conservative victories on this issue.

Yep.  Anyway, good job California Courts.  Now, here’s hoping the SCOTUS stands firm on the 2nd Amendment.

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