9th Circuit Issues Stay Against Ammo Injunction

UPDATE: NSSF reports the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has issued an administrative stay that halts the preliminary injunction against enforcing California's ammo background laws. The stay was in response to an emergency motion filed by state's attorney general. Ammo background checks are once again required in California.

Original Article Below

Saying California’s ammunition background check law “defies common sense,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled the state’s check unconstitutionally infringes on residents’ Second Amendment rights. Benitez issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the law from being enforced pending the resolution of a lawsuit filed by the California Rifle & Pistol Association and several co-plaintiffs—including lead plaintiff Olympic gold medalist shotgun athlete Kim Rhode.

A ballot-passed proposition and a state senate bill banned direct shipments of ammunition to citizens (which went into effect July 2018) and required background checks for all ammunition purchases (which went into effect July 2019). The measures also prohibited California residents from bringing in ammunition from other states.

The prohibition also applied to nonresidents traveling to the state for hunting trips. Out-of-state hunters have run into huge obstacles because not only are they unable to bring their own ammo—which has to be non-lead due to the California’s statewide ban on lead projectiles for hunting—they can’t purchase ammunition once they arrive because they’re not residents.

“The experiment has been tried. The casualties have been counted. California new ammunition background check law misfires and the Second Amendment rights of California citizens have been gravely injured,” Benitez wrote at the beginning of his ruling, which spanned 120 pages.

“No doubt, to prevent gun crime by preventing felons and other prohibited persons from acquiring ammunition is a laudable goal,” Benitez wrote. “But there is little evidence that pre-purchase ammunition checking will accomplish the goal and the burden it places on the Constitutional rights of law-abiding firearm owners is profound. Furthermore, compared to the discouraging effect on criminals, the laws have a severely disproportionate effect on law-abiding citizen-residents.”

When California’s ammunition background system went into effect last year, the state’s processes to institute the checks “failed miserably,” according to CRPA—denying many Californians the ability to purchase ammunition for their legally owned firearms.

“This is a devastating blow to the anti-gun-owner advocates who falsely pushed Prop 63 in the name of safety. In truth, red tape and the state’s disastrous database errors made it impossible for hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Californians to purchase ammunition for sport or self-defense.” said Chuck Michel, CRPA’s president and general counsel. “The Court found that the flimsy reasons offered by the government to justify these Constitutional infringements were woefully inadequate.”

This ruling is only an injunction against enforcing the ammunition background checks. The law and proposition still stand. CRPA expects the state to appeal the ruling, but at press time—the morning after the ruling—there had been no word from the state’s attorney general regarding such an appeal.

---