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Justices Won’t Hear Case on Waiting Period for Gun Purchases

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a California law that imposes a 10-day waiting period on firearms purchases.

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By
ADAM LIPTAK
, New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a California law that imposes a 10-day waiting period on firearms purchases.

As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for deciding not to hear the case. The court has turned away many Second Amendment cases in recent years, to the frustration of gun-rights groups and some conservative justices.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed an impassioned 14-page dissent in the case, Silvester v. Becerra, No. 17-342. “As evidenced by our continued inaction in this area,” he wrote, “the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this court.”

In 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep guns at home for self-defense.

Since then, the court has said little about what other laws may violate the Second Amendment. In the lower courts, few challenges to gun control laws since the Heller decision have succeeded.

The California law at issue in the new case was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, which accepted the state’s arguments that the waiting period was justified by the need to conduct background checks and the desirability of a “cooling off” period for gun buyers inclined to commit immediate violence.

Thomas wrote that many background checks can be completed quickly and that the cooling off period made no sense for people who already owned a gun. “Common sense suggests that subsequent purchasers contemplating violence or self-harm would use the gun they already own, instead of taking all the steps to legally buy a new one in California,” he wrote.

He said the appeals court’s decision was one of many in which Second Amendment rights have not been taken seriously in the lower courts.

“The Ninth Circuit’s deviation from ordinary principles of law is unfortunate, though not surprising,” Thomas wrote. “Its dismissive treatment of petitioners’ challenge is emblematic of a larger trend.”

“Our continued refusal to hear Second Amendment cases only enables this kind of defiance,” he wrote. “We have not heard argument in a Second Amendment case for nearly eight years.”

Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court has been much more attentive to other constitutional rights and would surely have mustered the four votes needed to put a case on the court’s docket had a different right been at issue.

“I suspect that four members of this court would vote to review a 10-day waiting period for abortions, notwithstanding a state’s purported interest in creating a ‘cooling off’ period,” he wrote. “I also suspect that four members of this court would vote to review a 10-day waiting period on the publication of racist speech, notwithstanding a state’s purported interest in giving the speaker time to calm down.”

“The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this court’s constitutional orphan,” Thomas wrote. “And the lower courts seem to have gotten the message.”

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