Texas legislators can’t be pleased by a proposal by Governor Newsom of California to copy as a gun control strategy the novel law the Lone Star State devised to limit abortions. Never mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The copycats in California could yet provide another reason for the Supreme Court to nip in the bud the whole idea of leaving enforcement to private citizens using civil lawsuits.

That’s a stratagem upon which the United States Supreme Court has yet to rule. In the Texas abortion battle, the high court on Friday granted opponents of the law the chance to “test” in lower courts its “compliance with the Federal Constitution.” Justice Gorsuch’s opinion noted that other “pre-enforcement challenges are possible too,” which, for better or worse, strikes us as a tempting invitation for someone.

California, though, has another hurdle to overcome if it does really attempt to follow Texas’s legislative lead — a federal law that gives gunmakers broad legal immunity from lawsuits. That’s not an absolute bar to civil action, as we learned in Connecticut, where the courts permitted Sandy Hook parents to sue gun makers. Still, it’s no small matter, in that it is bright line statute in the United States Code.

The Texas abortion law was devised by Jonathan Mitchell, an erstwhile clerk to Justice Scalia and once Texas’s solicitor general. He was animated, the New York Times reports, by frustration over federal courts blocking laws limiting abortions. “Texas has shown,” Mr. Mitchell told the Times, “that the states need not adopt a posture of learned helplessness in response to questionable or unconstitutional court rulings.”

The prospect of other states imitating Mr. Mitchell’s law was broached at the Supreme Court in November. Justice Kavanaugh asked Texas’s solicitor general if the law could be “the model for suppression of other constitutional rights with Second Amendment rights being the most likely targets.” He suggested states could, for example, impose million-dollar fines for anything from selling a semi-automatic rifle to declining “to provide a good or service for use in a same-sex marriage.”

Justice Kavanaugh’s was a prescient query. “If states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts,” Mr. Newsom now says, “then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives.” His proposed law allows individuals to sue “anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in the State of California.” As in Texas, the penalty will be “at least $10,000 per violation.”

Just as Mr. Mitchell seethed as courts thwarted state laws restricting abortion, Mr. Newsom is motivated by aggravation over judicial review. In June, a federal judge overturned the Golden State’s 1989 ban on so-called assault weapons. “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” District Judge Roger Benitez wrote in his ruling, adding that the rifle was good “for both home and battle.”

Judge Benitez’s ruling continued by noting “the AR-15 is the kind of versatile gun that lies at the intersection of the kinds of firearms protected” under Supreme Court precedents, particularly District of Columbia v. Heller. The judge’s defense of the Second Amendment has earned him the moniker “St. Benitez” among gun rights advocates, Los Angeles Times has reported. Meanwhile his ruling awaits review by the riders of the Ninth Circuit.

Mr. Newsom specifically singled out “federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives” when he announced his intended new law. Yet federal law could prove the more significant roadblock to his proposal. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act offers broad legal protections to makers and sellers of guns and ammunition. The law was designed, Senator Craig of Idaho has said, to “put an end to politically-motivated lawsuits against the firearms industry.”

The law blocks lawsuits over the harm “caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse” of guns and ammunition “when the product functioned as designed and intended.” Yet exceptions exist, for example in cases of negligence or manufacturing defects, as the Congressional Research Service reports. The negligence exception was the basis of a lawsuit filed against gunmakers by parents of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The Supreme Court has allowed that lawsuit to proceed.

New York State is also scheming to put gunmakers in legal jeopardy. In July, Governor Cuomo signed into law a measure making gunmakers liable to be sued if their weapons harm public “safety or health.” Citing “the public nuisance caused by” illegal guns, the law targets not only firearms makers but also anyone responsible for their sale or marketing. Precisely the kind of lawsuits the Congress sought to prevent from filling the courts.

California’s threat to use Texas’s anti-abortion tactics against those exercising Second Amendment rights is a reminder to be careful for what one wishes. Even so, constitutional fundamentalists might hang their hat on the fact that, unlike the privacy right that protects abortion, the Second Amendment — the right of the people to keep and bear arms — was not discovered in the shadows and penumbra of the national parchment. It is a matter of black letter constitutional law.

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Image of Judge Roger Benitez courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.