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The NSSF is on a roll, legally speaking, in California. Last week they got a favorable ruling in their challenge to the state’s ludicrous microstamping law. Now they’ve managed to extract $400,000 from the city of Pleasant Hill after city fathers (and mothers) tried to ghetto-ize the city’s gun stores and regulate them out of business. Here’s the NSSF’s press release:

California City Pays NSSF Legal Fees
In Ordinance Lawsuit Settlement 

NEWTOWN, Conn. – The National Shooting Sports Foundation® (NSSF®) announced today that it and co-plaintiff City Arms East, LLC have reached an agreement with the City of Pleasant Hill, California, to end a lawsuit challenging a 2013 ordinance that sought to impose burdensome and unlawful firearms and ammunition sales restrictions on local firearms retailers.

As a result of the settlement approved by the city council on Monday night, the City of Pleasant Hill will pay $400,000 to cover legal fees incurred by NSSF and City Arms in bringing the suit.

“We were successful in our goal to protect the ability of federally-licensed firearms retailers to open, operate and grow their businesses in the City of Pleasant Hill,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel. “As we predicted when the city council made its unfortunate decision to go forward with an ordinance, which only put into place duplicative, unneeded regulation and did nothing to enhance public safety, it was very likely that taxpayers would be left paying the tab for what amounts to an unwarranted political decision to target law-abiding businesses.”

In the process of passing the ordinance, the plaintiffs in their suit were able to provide concrete instances of Pleasant Hill’s own missteps and “hide the ball” tactics that the city’s own planning commission had opposed. To avoid a trial and reach a settlement, the city modified those aspects of its regulations that NSSF and City Arms argued were in violation of state law and the United States Constitution.

Craig Livingston of Livingston Law Firm in Walnut Creek represented NSSF in the action.

About NSSF
The National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade association for the firearms industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of more than 12,000 manufacturers, distributors, firearms retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen’s organizations and publishers. For more information, visit www.nssf.org.

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22 COMMENTS

  3. Unfortunately a lot of these places- and many of their voting citizens- consider it the cost of doing business.

    • the only way to win, in CA and other democratic hell holes, is to raise that cost so very high that even looking upon the printed numbers will bring a tear of regret to even Bloombergs eye.

  4. Maybe they’ll stop touching the stove if they get burned once in a while?
    Meh, they’ll probably just blame somebody else for the third degree burns.

  5. Good. I hope that life in Pleasant Hill is now a little more pleasant for gun store proprietors and gun owners, and a little less pleasant for the city’s leaders and the sheep that just got sheared.

  6. All of these anti-gun jurisdictions are in dire straights financially. Every million dollars they waste on fighting us is a million dollars they don’t have to feed their constituents.

    We need to support NSSF, NRA, SAF and others to continue to sue for every promising case where they can – at a minimum – impose a cost on the defending jurisdiction and – at best – recover their own costs of litigation. Suppose they could recover 80% of their costs of all such litigation. Then, we PotG only have to carry the remaining 20%. We CAN keep up with the taxpayers’ willingness to fund such litigation. Eventually, the governments we have to take-on will get the message and stop infringing on the RtKBA.

    • Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could find a way to require the opposing turkeys to own a rifle, pistol, and shotgun as part of the settlement? They’re trying to force me to *not* have a gun, seems like turnabout would be fun.

      • Oh hell no! The last thing you want is a brainless libturd with a gun, look at all the “mass shootings”, they were ALL perpetrated by leftists!

  7. Given where this happened, I’m sure the citizens who will foot the bill for this will blame NSSF and not their city government.

    • I’m a resident of Pleasant Hill. In quite certain I will get passed this bill. I blame the city and support the store.

  8. The legal team is from Walnut Creek, that’s a short BART ride into San Francisco. Might be able to clean up that mess as well.

  9. Taxpayers foot the bill again. It justice the nssf won but the money should come out of the campaign funds of the politicians or their assets

  11. I just love awards of attorneys’ fees on cases like this. Imagine the conversation between the lawyers and the politicians: “But you never told us we’d have to pay if we lost!”

  12. Mental note: Congratulate NSSF by making a donation. Nicely, done. I may be looking at buying land in WI, but I’m not done fighting for gun rights in CA. And I’m really looking forward to a Scalia-style justice or two to be added to SCOTUS and federal district courts.

  14. One would hope that taxpayers’ reaction is outrage that the politicians they elected to manage tax money responsibly wasted $400k defending a patently flawed ordinance. But this is California. They might actually think it was worth a try. Remember that Gavin Newsome’s Proposition 63 won 63% to 37% and he is a good bet to succeed Jerry Brown as governor.

    In California, the coastal cities are leftist (To me, liberal should mean libertarian.) while the rest of the state is actually conservative. However, the large population of the coastal cities enables them to dominate state politics. The same is true of Illinois and New York. The Founding Fathers must have foreseen this problem on a national level. They prevented it by allocating House seats approximately by population but gave each state two senators no matter how small its population. The consequence is that populous states can’t steamroller rural states with small populations. This transfers to the Electoral College where each state gets one elector for each representative and one for each senator. It explains why Hillary could win the popular vote while Trump won the election. She forgot, but Trump realized, that you can’t win without those rural states. Trump has already stated that he would have run his campaign differently had the outcome depended on the popular vote.

  15. The City Council members have burdened the city taxpayers with the bill for their moral preening. Any chance that any of these poseurs will face the wrath of the voters? Not likely; it is California after all.

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