By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The battle over California’s background check mandate for ammunition purchases—declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court panel—has been stepped up a notch by the U.S. Department of Justice, which has filed an amicus brief in the case, supporting the plaintiff.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced DOJ’s entry into the case via a post on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter). The case is known as Rhode v. Bonta.
As noted by the Washington Examiner, the District Court in Southern District of California and a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco have both found against California’s law. The state has now requested a full rehearing before an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit, which follows a pattern with this liberal circuit. The hearing is scheduled in March.
Additionally, an amicus brief filed by attorneys general representing 25 states has also been filed, supporting the lower court’s ruling that the background check requirement violates the Second Amendment. Another brief has been submitted by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Second Amendment Foundation and Second Amendment Law Center.
Language in the DOJ brief, signed by Dhillon, is bristling.
“Tens of thousands of lawful gun owners seeking to purchase ammunition are rejected annually in the background-check process,” the brief notes. “Those rejections are not because these citizens are a danger to society or because they are on the prohibited list; rather, they are often because of simple address mismatches or difficulty in retrieving the gun owner’s record. Fixing those issues—which could involve contacting the State to access and ultimately correct the record on file—can take months. California’s burdensome barriers have achieved their goal: Over a third of the law-abiding citizens rejected in January 2022 still had not purchased ammunition six months later. And that does not even take into account those citizens who have been discouraged from even attempting a purchase in the first place.”
As asserted in the brief, this was essentially the goal of the California “regime.”
“California’s requirement that gun owners undergo background checks each time they seek to purchase ammunition plainly implicates the Second Amendment’s right to ‘bear Arms.’ And under Second Amendment review, California’s background-check regime for ammunition purchases is straightforwardly unconstitutional,” the DOJ says in its 36-page brief.
The separate brief from the attorneys general represents Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, the Arizona Legislature, Idaho, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Not a single state with a Democrat attorney general joined the brief.
