While many of us were taking the rest of the week off after the New Year’s holiday, folks at a couple of major gun-rights organizations were back at work, fighting for the Second Amendment-protected rights of lawful American gun owners.
On January 2, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) and the Second Amendment Law Center (SALC) filed an amicus brief with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Rhode v. Bonta, the case challenging California’s ammunition background check law.
This case affects thousands of law-abiding Californians who face wrongful denials and excessive costs when trying to exercise their right to acquire ammunition for self-defense and other lawful purposes. In addition, each time they use this faulty system to purchase ammunition, purchasers must pay a minimum of $5.
Moreover, it entirely blocks residents of other states from buying ammunition in California. The brief filed by the gun-rights groups explains why the 9th Circuit can strike down the faulty background check system in its entirety and also summarizes the totality of the regulatory and financial burdens facing those seeking to purchase a firearm in California.
“As we note in the brief, California started this ammunition background check in 2019, and there is no basis for it in historical tradition,” CCRKBA Managing Director Andrew Gottlieb said in a news release announcing the filing. “The state even acknowledged in its district court declarations more than one-in-ten Golden State residents are erroneously rejected, and there has been no valid explanation for this. On top of that, the system rejects all non-residents who want to purchase ammunition in California, which translates to a meaningful restraint on the Second Amendment.”
The brief also pointedly refers to the 9th Circuit’s sordid history of vacating nearly all Second Amendment panel victories with an en banc rehearing, as it has done again in this case.
“We realize the Ninth Circuit is not friendly to the Second Amendment, but this case challenges a law which is so egregious in its nature that it cannot be ignored,” Gottlieb said. “The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, yet the California legislature routinely treats it differently than any other right. That’s got to cease, and the Rhode challenge of this ammunition background check requirement may very well end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Speaking for his organization, Kostas Moros, SAF director of legal research and education, said that among other deficiencies, the law also fails to meet the historical precedent test set forth in the 2022 Bruen ruling, which changed the way Second Amendment cases were to be decided.
“California’s ammunition background check regime defies Bruen by imposing a burdensome and error-prone system that rejects a large fraction of eligible purchasers, denying law-abiding citizens their Second Amendment rights without historical justification,” Moros said in an SAF-issued news release. “History shows no tradition of such invasive and inaccurate checks on ammunition purchases, and we urge the Court to affirm the district court’s ruling striking down this unconstitutional barrier.”
En banc oral arguments in the case are set to begin on March 26.
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