Pistol designs are frozen in a 2007 time warp.
On March 20, 2023, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California issued a preliminary injunction in Boland v. Bonta against enforcement of California’s ban on the retail sale of semiautomatic pistols that do not have a chamber load indicator, a magazine disconnect mechanism, and microstamping capability. Since no pistols with all three features are manufactured nationwide, the Unsafe Handgun Act amounts to a prohibition that violates the Second Amendment. The Act requires Californians who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights to purchase pistols designed over two decades ago and prohibits, with narrow exceptions, their acquisition of modern-day pistols.
A chamber load indicator may take the form of either a visual recess or a small stud that protrudes upward from atop a pistol slide when a cartridge is in the chamber. A magazine disconnect prevents a pistol from being fired unless a magazine is fully engaged in the pistol. These designs do exist, but the latter is rejected by many for the very reason that it may prevent the pistol from being fired in an emergency.
Microstamping is the mostly-theoretical process that consists of the transfer from a firearm’s firing pin to the cartridge casing of a fired round of ammunition microscopic characters identifying the firearm’s make, model, and serial number. This is not a feasible technology and just doesn’t exist in reality. That’s why, Boland found that, “no handgun available in the world has all three of these features.”
By Stephen Halbrook
