Dramatic anecdotes and a tendency toward gun-related puns seem at times designed to troll gun-safety advocates, who view his rulings and his expansive view of the 2nd Amendment with a mixture of outrage and alarm.
Laura J. Nelson and Kristina Davis
August 8, 2021
The judge upending California’s gun laws: ‘Blessed’ jurist or ‘stone-cold ideologue’?
[This is regarding U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez who has been throwing out some of California’s oppressive gun laws.
I don’t think it does any good to troll the anti-gun people in judicial rulings. Rather I think they should be treated with a certain amount of respect as they are prosecuted.
I didn’t know that he is 70 years old and semi-retired. That explains why some of his rulings have taken so long.
Reading about his experience as a child in Cuba may explain why he gives the 2nd Amendment the respect it deserves:
In September 1960, Castro set up a network of “revolutionary collective vigilance” committees in neighborhoods across the country. Its members, covert adherents to the Communist Party, began going door to door, asking neighbors to surrender their weapons, said Lillian Guerra, a University of Florida history professor.
At school, Benitez and his classmates were pulled out of class and questioned about their parents’ view of the revolution. His father was a businessman, and his mother held advanced degrees. In the Daily Journal, Benitez recalled opening the front door one day to see two armed people in army uniforms who took his mother away.
“We didn’t see her for three days,” he told the Daily Journal. “We didn’t know where she was, what happened to her, whether she was dead or alive.”
That would make quite the impression.—Joe]