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The federal judge who has repeatedly ruled against California’s restrictions on firearms has turned his attention to another state-prohibited weapon, billy clubs.
The wooden or metal rods wielded by police are “arms” that cannot be withheld from law-abiding citizens, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego said Thursday in a ruling barring state enforcement of the law. He said the California law, passed in 1923, violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, as recently redefined by the Supreme Court.
“It is a simple weapon that most anybody between the ages of 8 and 80 can fashion from a wooden stick, or a clothes pole, or a dowel rod,” Benitez wrote. “One can easily imagine countless citizens carrying these weapons on daily walks and hikes to defend themselves against attacks by humans and animals.”
State Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a notice of appeal Monday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has reversed most of Benitez’s previous rulings against gun laws.
“This decision puts public safety at risk,” Bonta said in a statement. He said modern billy clubs can be concealed in one’s clothing, then drawn out, unfolded and used to inflict serious injuries.
The suit was filed by two San Diego-area residents who said they were trained to use billy clubs while in U.S. military service and want to carry them for self-protection. Their attorney, Alan Beck, said the case challenged “a very vague law that has been used to criminalize possession of any stick in the right circumstances.”
“If you have a baseball bat in your car, you should have a ball and mitt with them” to avoid being charged with carrying an illegal weapon, Beck told the Chronicle.
Benitez, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004, ruled in 2017 that California’s ban on gun magazines that carry more than 10 cartridges was unconstitutional, a ruling later overturned by the 9th Circuit. Since then, the National Rifle Association and its allies have filed their gun-law challenges in San Diego federal court, and Benitez has agreed to hear them as cases “related” to his 2017 ruling.
Last month he struck down, for the second time, a California law requiring background checks for purchasers of firearms ammunition. The 9th Circuit had reinstated the law after Benitez’s first ruling in 2020, but returned the case to him for reconsideration after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that substantially limited state and federal authority to regulate firearms.
In that ruling, which overturned a New York law requiring individuals to show a special need for self-defense in order to carry concealed weapons in public, Justice Clarence Thomas said any restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation,” from colonial times to the post-Civil War years.
Before that ruling, Benitez had considered and upheld California’s ban on private possession of billy clubs, saying it passed the constitutional test because it was “longstanding.” But in last week’s decision he said the 1923 law violates the Supreme Court’s new Second Amendment standards.
“In early America,” Benitez said, “a billy was used for self-defense and keeping the peace and (unsurprisingly) sometimes, for criminal purposes.” Not a single state outlawed billy clubs between 1791 and the end of the Civil War, he said, and a handful of state restrictions in the postwar years imposed criminal penalties for concealment or assault with the clubs but did not prohibit their possession.
“To give full life to the core right of self-defense,” the judge wrote, “every law-abiding responsible individual citizen has a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms like the billy for lawful purposes.”