Judge VanDyke Displays Handguns in Unusual Video Dissent (1)

Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke shared a video of him going over the components of several handguns in his chambers, as part of his dissent over a California gun law.

The Donald Trump appointee linked to an 18-minute video as he dissented from the court’s ruling on Thursday that upheld a law limiting gun magazine capacity to 10 or fewer rounds.

In the video, dressed in his judicial robes and appearing in his chambers, VanDyke said he was making it because “in this instance, showing is much more effective than telling.”

The video faced backlash from VanDyke’s fellow judges on the San Francisco-based court. The majority ruling said in a footnote that it wasn’t considering the factual information introduced in VanDyke’s dissent because it was outside the factual record presented to the circuit.

“Judicial notice plainly does not authorize the judge-made video contained in Judge VanDyke’s dissenting opinion,” the judges said. Six judges also joined a separate opinion against VanDyke’s video.

VanDyke, who sits in Reno, Nevada, disclosed membership in several gun groups as the Senate considered his nomination in 2019.

VanDyke said in the video that, after an exchange during arguments, “it became clear to me that many, including both California’s counsel and my colleagues in the majority of this case, lack the basic familiarity with handguns to understand the inherent shortcomings and obvious inadministrability of the test that California was proposing and which the majority in this case has now adopted.”

Making those remarks at a desk, with a mounted AK-47 assault rifle displayed on the wall in the background, VanDyke said he had “rendered inoperable” all the handguns for safety reasons.

He then went over the components of multiple handguns he had displayed on a table. He walked through the different components, at one point dumping out a pile of grips from a Ninth Circuit tote bag.

At the end of the video, VanDyke said California’s law is “simply unrealistic and could never be applied in real life.”

“Like many of this court’s ideas about the Second Amendment, it stems from a basic misunderstanding of how firearms work combined with a highly unrealistic idea about how such a rule would be administered in real life,” the judge said.

‘Wildly Improper’

The video was heavily criticized in a concurring opinion written by Senior Judge Marsha Berzon and joined by five other judges. That opinion said the “wildly improper video presentation warrants additional comment, lest the genre proliferate.”

Berzon said the circuit’s rules state that decisions must be written. But she said that more troubling is VanDyke appearing in the video himself and making factual assertions about how guns work. She said he appeared to be acting as an expert witness.

“Judge VanDyke might well be able to qualify as an expert on guns. But whatever specialized expertise we bring to the bench is irrelevant to our role as judges,” Berzon wrote. “Our job is not to provide the facts that support our conclusions but to apply the law to the facts as presented by the parties. Judge VanDyke’s factual presentation flips this foundational principle on its head.”

The Ninth Circuit declined to comment and the US Marshals Service didn’t respond to a request for comment regarding courthouse protocols for the possession of firearms by judges.

Gun Cases

Lee Epstein, a professor of legal ethics at Washington University at St. Louis, said in an email that the video dissent “fits with a more general pattern of Trump appointees using gun litigation to audition for a higher judicial post—in Judge VanDyke’s case, a seat on the Supreme Court.”

Epstein co-authored a paper published last month in Duke Law Journal Online on how judges are ruling in Second Amendment cases after recent Supreme Court decisions.

“Because of the political divide on gun rights and Trump’s repeated assertions that his judges will protect Second Amendment rights, gun–rights cases present an opportunity for promotion-seeking judges to show their partisan chops to would-be appointers,” the paper reads.

Bill Sack, director of legal operations with the Second Amendment Foundation, said in an email that VanDyke’s demonstration highlights Second Amendment advocates’ frustration that gun control policy creators “rarely have the faintest idea of how guns actually work.”

“The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words remains true to this day,” Sack wrote. “Legal briefing and even oral argument are limited to the extent that—under page or time limit—attorneys and judges are forced to describe the features and functionality of parts, rather than actually see what they look like and how they function in concert.”

VanDyke has written sharp opinions jabbing at his colleagues before. In 2022 he wrote an alternate draft opinion in a separate gun case that he suggested a majority of the en banc court might adopt, if they were to review his decision. “You’re welcome,” he wrote sarcastically.

His Senate confirmation hearing was unusually emotional, with VanDyke crying as he defended himself from an unqualified rating from the American Bar Association. That finding cited legal peers who called him accomplished but “arrogant, lazy and an ideologue.” Republican allies dismissed the ABA conclusions as liberal bias and defended his qualifications.

The case isDuncan v Bonta, 9th Cir. en banc, No. 23-55805, 3/20/25