U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke is urging the Supreme Court of the United States to issue some “benchslaps” for his own court’s gun rulings.
VanDyke wants SCOTUS to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s “wayward Second Amendment decisions” that have heretofore allowed California gun controls to remain in place, according to Bloomberg Law.
VanDyke said, “To put it more colloquially, it’s time for some benchslaps. Nothing less will give this court any pause before ultimately blessing every arms restriction it reviews.”
He called attention to Bruen (2022), noting that despite that ruling the Ninth Circuit has a “long and concerning history of refusing to vindicate the Second Amendment.”
VanDyke expressed these things while dissenting from a Ninth Circuit decision not to rehear a ruling that “upheld a California law restricting the concealed carry of switchblade knives.”
He suggested the “benchslaps” could look like this:
Dear lower court:
Your decision sucks…. And it sucks so badly, it isn’t even worth a closer look.
Kindly re-do it.
Regards,
The Supreme Court.
After being accused of using “vulgar barroom talk” to make his points, VanDyke said, “So let me assuage my colleagues’ selective Victorian predilections up front. Calm down.”
On March 21, 2025, Breitbart News reported that VanDyke issued a video dissent to the Ninth Circuit’s majority ruling in Duncan v. Bonta. In that decision, the Ninth Circuit majority held that a magazine holding more than ten rounds is not an arm protected by the Second Amendment.
In that video dissent, VanDyke noted:
California acknowledges that a magazine is necessary to make a firearm function, but they argue that because you can replace the standard magazine with one that holds fewer rounds — ten rounds or less — then these higher capacity magazines are not an arm, thus wholly unprotected by the Second Amendment.
He warned that the “exact same argument” would apply to almost every part of the firearm, which means “essentially nothing on [the] firearm would be protected by the Second Amendment.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.