9th Circuit Judges Pushing Back Against Cali One-Gun-A-Month Law

Attorney’s with the State of California are meeting with some pushback over their recent testimony before the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals on the state’s one-gun-a-month law.

On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Jerry T. Yen attempted to make his case in Nguyen v. Bonta, but some justices on the court seemed skeptical about his claims. In fact, in defending the law, Yen tried to make the case that it was intended to stop straw buyers, but at least one of the judges didn’t find that assertion credible.

“Do arms traffickers buy two at a time?,” asked U.S. Circuit Judge Danielle Forrest. “It seems like no.”

According to Yen, the law is a regulation on when you can own a gun, not if you can do so. But that argument didn’t sit well with Judge Forrest, either.

“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. People would say that’s absurd,” Forrest said during the proceeding. 

Judge John Owens further tore into Yen’s reasoning on one-gun-a-month law by using the scenario of a liquor store owner who might be threatened by a gang both at his business and his home. If the owner wanted two guns but didn’t have any, he would have to buy one, then wait 30 days to buy another. And Owens believes in that case the law would keep him from defending himself under the Second Amendment.

The appeal before the 9^th Circuit comes after a U.S. District court ruled the law to be unconstitutional earlier this year. Of course, California is only too happy to spend taxpayer money to continue defending the law.

As the National Rifle Association argued in a brief filed in the case in June: “This Court has twice held that the Second Amendment protects the right to acquire arms. This Court’s prior holdings are supported by Supreme Court precedent. First, the Supreme Court has determined that ‘keep Arms’ in the Amendment’s text means to ‘have weapons,’ and the plain meaning of ‘have’ encompasses the act of acquisition. Second, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that certain rights are implicit in enumerated guarantees. In the Second Amendment context, four Justices have recognized—and none have disagreed—that firearms training is ‘a necessary concomitant’ of the right to keep and bear arms. As this Court, the Third Circuit, and many district courts have recognized, acquiring a firearm must be a necessary concomitant as well.”

The state is also trying to meet the second Bruen standard by arguing that there is historic precedence for limiting gun purchases to one every 30 days. But it’s likely that assertion will fall on deaf ears, too.

As the NRA also pointed out in its brief: “The State argues that a more nuanced analogical approach is required because historically firearms were too laborious to manufacture and too expensive to purchase for firearms to be available for bulk purchase. In fact, firearms were ubiquitous in early America, and affordable enough for every militiaman and many women to be required to purchase one or several firearms. Indeed, newspaper advertisements regularly offered large quantities of firearms for sale.”

Further bolstering that point, the brief continued: “In any event, California does not merely prohibit ‘bulk’ purchases; it prohibits the purchase of even two firearms in one month. Americans commonly purchased multiple firearms in a single transaction in the colonial and founding eras—and no law ever forbade it.”