I was sort of curious how the SF law requiring hand guns to be secured was consistent with Heller. I was thinking of responding to the more paniced takes on "they're gonna take away our guns." Which they aren't. and can't do. I found this in SF's brief to the supreme court arguing that the court shouldn't take the case, and the court ended up declining the case.
The District of Columbia ordinance at issue in
Heller “totally ban[ned] handgun possession in the
home.” 554 U.S. at 628. The ordinance also required
“that firearms in the home be rendered and kept inoperable
at all times,” even during emergencies.
Id. at
630 (emphasis added). Although the Court’s opinion
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in
Heller was lengthy, it devoted only a single paragraph
to the validity of the District’s trigger-lock
requirement. What petitioners characterize as “crystal
clear” evidence of the impermissibility of San
Francisco’s ordinance, Pet. 10, reads in its entirety:
“We must also address the District’s requirement (as
applied to respondent’s handgun) that firearms in the
home be rendered and kept inoperable at all times.
This makes it
impossible for citizens to use them for
the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence
unconstitutional.”
Heller, 554 U.S. at 630 (emphasis
added).
In contrast, San Francisco’s ordinance allows
citizens to carry loaded and unlocked handguns on
their person at any time, including in a holster. It
also allows citizens to store loaded handguns within
an easily opened lockbox rather than “disassembled
or bound by a trigger lock at all times.”
Heller, 554
U.S. at 628. San Francisco’s ordinance does not
regulate the use or storage of long guns. Perhaps
most importantly, San Francisco’s storage law allows
handguns to be used for self-defense, in contrast to
the District’s absolute inoperability requirement,
which contained no exception allowing a gun to be
assembled or untethered from a trigger lock for selfdefense
uses.
Id. at 630 (holding that any self-defense
exception was “precluded by the unequivocal text” of
the District’s ordinance). Moreover, the district court
found, and the court of appeals agreed, that in light
of San Francisco’s showing that modern lockboxes
allow ready access to handguns, the ordinance did
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not impair the ability of citizens to use those guns for
self-defense.
Thus, petitioners are flatly wrong when they
suggest that San Francisco’s ordinance “has the very
same forbidden effect” as the District’s absolute ban.
Pet. 10. On the contrary,
Heller itself disavows “the
invalidity of laws regulating the storage of firearms
to prevent accidents” because such laws “do not
remotely burden the right of self-defense as much as
an absolute ban on handguns.” 554 U.S. at 632. The
circuit court’s determination that the San Francisco
law imposes only an insubstantial burden on the
Second Amendment right, and is therefore a valid
storage law, is consistent with
Heller’s reasoning and
its conclusion.
http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/2015-03-13-CCSFs-Brief-in-Opposition.pdf
