About 10 months ago it was predicted that California will be shall issue in 2014. But it appears that prediction was contingent upon the Supreme Court resolving the split between the circuits on the issue of whether carry outside the home is a protected right or not. The court did not accept the cases presented to them.

But the case in Idaho, which is in the Ninth Circuit and includes California, from the other day which just ruled regulation of carry outside the home is subject to at least intermediate scrutiny and perhaps strict scrutiny. That case could help California residents.

Regardless of how things are going at the Federal level that prediction is getting a little closer to realization:

In a decision released today that forces the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to begin accepting and processing handgun carry license applications, Judge Deirdre Hill said that LASD must “consider the applications of all persons seeking a CCW permit in the first instance without requiring any applicant to first seek a CCW permit with his/her local police chief or city.”

The case, titled Lu v. Baca, was filed in 2012 by California-based gun rights organization The Calguns Foundation and a number of individual plaintiffs seeking to overturn an unlawful LASD policy that functioned as a de facto ban on handgun carry licenses for Los Angeles County residents.

Via email from Mike B. we have a ruling in Morris v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (D. Idaho Jan. 10, 2014). And as Mike pointed out in his email this affects my stomping grounds where I have carried many times on lands directly addressed in the ruling when I had no idea such stupid regulations even existed.

Eugene Volokh, Dave Hardy, Say Uncle, and Sebastian all commented on the ruling. Hardy was the only one that even mentioned the judge says the strict scrutiny must be used when determining whether a law or regulations infringes upon the 2nd Amendment. The court said:

The regulation at issue would ban firearms and ammunition in a tent on the Corps’ sites. This ban poses a substantial burden on a core Second Amendment right and is therefore subject to strict scrutiny.

…

While the ban on carrying firearms for self-defense may impose a burden on this core right of the Second Amendment severe enough to call for strict scrutiny, it is unnecessary for the Court to decide that issue because the regulation fails to pass muster even if intermediate scrutiny is applied.

If strict scrutiny is required to regulate the carrying a firearm for self-defense this will almost certainly mean constitutional carry will become the law of the land.

It sounded to me like the shotgun was empty. But the point being made is valid.