Lawful Californians can now officially buy as many guns as they want whenever they want to—just like citizens in most of the rest of the United States—thanks to a Thursday ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the case Nguyen v. Bonta, the court issued an order reversing the previously issued stay in the lawsuit, which challenges California’s gun rationing law that allows only one gun purchase in every 30 days. With the stay reversed, the final judgment and injunction the Firearms Policy Coalition secured at the district court is now in effect, preventing the state from enforcing the punitive law.
The lawsuit was brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), and officials with the organization were thrilled with the court’s ruling.
“This order allows our hard-won injunction to take effect and, unless the 9th Circuit issues a new stay, Californians may now apply to purchase multiple firearms within a 30-day period,” said Brandon Combs, FPC president. “FPC intends to make Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta respect Second Amendment rights whether they like it or not.”
In March, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled the one-gun-a-month (OGM) law to be unconstitutional because it infringes on the plaintiff’s Second Amendment rights and the state didn’t meet the second Bruen standard of showing a historical precedent for the law during the founding period. The best the state could do is prove there were licensing taxing regulations, and that’s what it based its defense of the law on.
“The taxing and licensing regulations are not ‘relevantly similar’ to the OGM law,” Judge William Q Hays wrote in the court’s opinion on the case. “Unlike the OGM law, taxing and licensing regulations placed no limit on the quantity or frequency with which one could acquire firearms. In fact, the licensing regulations proffered by Defendants imposed no burden on the acquisition of firearms; they regulated only the seller. Accordingly, these laws do not establish a ‘tradition of firearm regulation’ similar to the OGM law.”
Because of that, the court determined that the law was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.
“Defendants have not met their burden of producing a ‘well-established and representative historical analogue’ to the OGM law,” the opinion concluded. “The Court therefore concludes that Plaintiffs are entitled to summary judgment as to the constitutionality of the OGM law under the Second Amendment.”
Following that ruling, the state was able to get the court to stay the opinion pending its appeal to the 9th Circuit, which has now lifted the stay.
Incidentally, it wasn’t too many years ago that the 9th Circuit was the most gun unfriendly circuit court in the country, regularly issuing outrageous rulings concerning Second Amendment cases. But during former President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, he appointed 10 new judges to the court, representing more than a third of the full 9th Circuit.
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