Alamy Stock Photo “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” US District Judge Roger T. Benitez wrote. In another section, he downplayed the risk of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting as an “infinitesimally rare event.” He added: “More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California.” Benitez has consistently ruled against California’s gun control laws by using these sorts of attention-grabbing analogies. In a March 2019 ruling against the state’s limits on large-capacity magazines, Benitez opened with the dramatic stories of three women who ran out of ammo while shooting home intruders — none of which took place in California. In a page 5 footnote, he cited Kristallnacht, the 1938 night of anti-Semitic violence in Nazi Germany.