Everyone knows the government can’t ban political speech, but what about putting conditions on it? The Supreme Court has (for better or for worse) upheld noise ordinances and restrictions on the time, place, and manner of speech, but what if a state banned political speech with an exception for those who could successfully turn lead into gold? Would this be a complete ban? Or would the impossible alchemists’ exception mean it could somehow be squared with the First Amendment?
That hypothetical might sound absurd, but is effectively how California currently treats handguns. California’s Crime Gun Identification Act of 2007 was the first piece of legislation to require firearms in the United States to contain “microstamping” technology. It requires that any new semiautomatic handgun sold in California must stamp each fired casing in two locations with “a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol.”
There are a number of problems with this law, but one stood out to us: the technology to do what California demands does not exist. While a patent exists and prototypes were tested, the concept remains “unreliable, easily defeated and simply impossible to implement.” Because of this, no gunmaker has been able to introduce a new firearm to California since 2013.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/alchemists-license-pocket-or-are-you-just-happy-see-me
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