Ninth Circuit Court Shuts Down California’s One-Gun-A-Month Law

A panel of three judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the stay against the injunction on California’s one-gun-a-month law. The injunction is now wholly in place, blocking California from enforcing its gun control scheme to bottleneck the process of acquiring firearms.

In 2020, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), the Second Amendment Foundation, and several others filed Nguyen v. Bonta (then known as Nguyen v. Becerra), challenging California’s “1-IN-30” law in the United States District Court for The Southern District of California. The “1-IN-30” law restricted the number of handguns or center-fired semiautomatic rifles a person could buy to one a month. The plaintiffs claimed that the state violated its citizens’ Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

A District Court Judge would agree with the plaintiffs and issue an injunction against the law. California would announce its appeal to the Ninth Circuit and ask for an emergency stay against the District Court’s injunction. The Circuit Court would grant the state’s request for a stay. A three-judge panel was assigned consisting of two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee and oral arguments were heard on August 14.

The California Attorney General’s Office seemed ill-prepared for the questions asked by the Circuit Court judges. The two Trump-appointed judges and one Obama-appointed judge asked pointed questions, which state attorney Jerry Yen didn’t seem to have good answers to. The day would be a long day for Yen.

Under the Supreme Court’s Bruen opinion, the Courts can only consider the text, tradition, and history of the Second Amendment when deciding if a gun law is constitutional. Once the plaintiff shows that the law falls outside the plain text of the Second Amendment, the onus falls on the defense to provide analogs to show the law is consistent with the tradition and history of the Second Amendment from the founding era.

Although the state did try to provide some analogs, the judges were not impressed. The laws presented by the defense were gunpowder storage laws, which were more about preventing fires than restricting arms. The state also tried to use laws from the founding era that disarmed “bad guys,” but the “bad guys,” in this case, were Native Americans. The judges pointed out that the defense was using racist laws to defend its position.

“Well, there’s troubling analogues based on race and restraints trying to keep people from selling firearms to Native Americans. Are those designed to target ‘bad guys,’ as you put it?” Trump-appointed Judge Bridget Bade asked Yen.

The Second Amendment cannot be treated differently than other rights. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said, “The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” and the judges leaned into that viewpoint. The judges highlighted that if a restriction like California’s “1-IN-30” law was applied to any other right, it wouldn’t survive constitutional muster.

“It would be absurd to think that a government could say you can only buy one book a month because we want to make sure that you really understand the books you read, or you could only attend one protest a month because, you know, there’s some societal drawbacks from having protests so we want to kind of space those out,” Trump appointed-judge People would say that’s absurd,” Trump-appointed Judge Danielle Forrest said.

If Yen thought Obama-appointed Judge John B. Owens would be sympathetic to the defense’s arguments, he was sorely mistaken. Judge Owens brought up a situation where someone needed two guns for two different locations and didn’t currently own any firearms. Yen’s only answer was that the plaintiffs in the case were already gun owners, and since the lawsuit was filed in 2020, they had enough time to buy multiple guns. The judges didn’t seem to buy the arguments.

The next day, the judges would unanimously reverse the stay, enacting the injunction. It is suspected that California will ask for an en banc hearing where the full bench will hear the case. If an en banc is granted, then the three-judge panel’s decision will be vacated.

About John Crump

Mr. Crump is an NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, or at www.crumpy.com.