Judge permanently blocks California ammo background check law

SAN DIEGO (CN) — A federal judge in San Diego permanently blocked California from enforcing a law requiring background checks every time a gun owner wishes to buy ammunition.

Filed in 2018, the case took aim at intertwined state laws. 

Proposition 63, passed by voters in 2016, required gun owners to pay $50 and undergo a criminal background check to receive a 4-year permit to buy ammunition. But before the proposition passed, the Legislature prospectively amended it to require gun owners to submit a background check every time they wanted to buy ammunition and barred gun owners from purchasing ammo from out-of-state vendors. 

“The ammunition background checks laws have no historical pedigree and operate in such a way that they violate the Second Amendment right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his order granting a permanent injunction. “Perhaps the simpler, 4-year and $50 ammunition purchase permit approved by the voters in Proposition 63, would have fared better.”   

Benitez called the plan passed by voters “a more reasonable constitutional approach than the current scheme.”  

In his characteristic graphic and literary prose style, Benitez added the Legislature's plan was an expensive and unnecessary roadblock forced upon guns owners a million times each year to buy ammunition. He compared the scheme to having to pass a credit check every time a car owner needs to fill the gas tank or recharge their electric car — but one that also put gun owners' safety and security at risk.        

“Suppose a plaintiff described the wrong like this: having been threatened by lawless rioting two blocks from home and with more threatened violence anticipated, plaintiff desires to buy ammunition for his firearm today so as to be able to defend himself and his household tonight, but is unable to do so because the background check system erroneously reports that he is not an authorized purchaser. The government would then say that the wrong, as described, is not covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment. But all a plaintiff needs to allege is that by preventing him from buying ammunition, the government’s background check system infringed his right to bear arms for self-defense. That is what is done here,” Benitez wrote. 

In the first six months of 2022, more than 538,000 background checks were processed. Out of that, more than 58,000 were rejected because they didn’t match with the state’s repository of firearm records called the Automated Firearms System, 85% of which were because of address or name mismatches or because the applicant didn’t have an AFS record. 

Between July 2019 and Jan. 31 2020, 770 people were kept from buying ammunition by the background check system. Out of that group, 16 were found to be incorrectly identified, and 15 were later arrested, which led to four felony and two misdemeanor convictions.

“A state law requiring identification before voting, where 4.5% of all voters lacked the requisite identification documents to vote, was struck down because the excessive burden abridged the constitutional right, and more specifically for violating the Voting Rights Act,” Benitez wrote, citing Veasey v. Abbott in Texas. “If a state identification requirement for voting which burdens 4.5% of registered voters is an unconstitutional burden on the 15th Amendment, surely a state identification requirement that blocks an untold number of gun owners from undergoing an ammunition background check and then rejects 11% of those who are checked, is likewise an unconstitutional burden on the Second Amendment.”

With the help of the gun rights group California Rifle & Pistol Association, whose lawsuits challenging other gun control laws in the state have ended up in Benitez’s court due to an obscure court rule in the federal district in San Diego requiring “related cases” be assigned to the same judge, Olympic medalist skeet shooter Kim Rhode and other gun owners sued Xavier Becerra, then state attorney general, in 2018. 

In April 2020, Benitez blocked California from enforcing the background checks. The state then appealed, but the Ninth Circuit remanded following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, which requires any restrictions or regulations involving firearms must be justified through a "historical analogue" — a similar burden imposed or in existence in the past, namely when the Second Amendment was written.

The attorney general presented a list of 148 historical gun control laws to the court, stretching from 1403 to 1938. Fifty came from the 17th and 18th century, nearer to when the Second Amendment was adopted. A number of the laws the state compiled made it a crime for people of color to own guns or ammunition.  

“This is the third time the attorney general has cited these laws in support for its laws and restrictions implicating the Second Amendment. These 50 laws identified by the attorney general constitute a long, embarrassing, disgusting, insidious, reprehensible list of examples of government tyranny toward our own people,” Benitez wrote. 

When the attorney general asked to be excused from trying to find historical analogues because the internet makes it easier to process background checks than possible in the 18th and 19th centuries, and because unregistered and unregulated “ghost guns” are a problem in the 21st century, Benitez swatted the argument down. 

 “States could have addressed the problem of dangerous armed citizens in this way, but they did not. Based on the historical record prepared by the attorney general, when states addressed the concern at all, they addressed it by later seizing firearms from the individual rather than preventing ahead of time the acquisition of ammunition by all individuals,” he wrote. 

Chuck Michel, the plaintiffs' attorney and the president of the California Rifle & Pistol Association applauded Benitez's ruling — and chastised the state.

"This law, like most of California’s gun control laws, has not made anyone safer. But it has made it much more difficult and expensive for law-abiding gun owners to exercise their Second Amendment right to defend themselves and their family, and has blocked many eligible people from getting the ammunition they need — which is the true political intent behind most of these laws," Michel said by email.

Current state Attorney General Rob Bonta took to X, formerly Twitter, to blast the ruling.

“We will seek an immediate stay of the district court decision, to maintain CA’s life-saving, constitutional ammunition laws in Rhode v. Bonta,” Bonta tweeted. “Background checks save lives. We’ll continue to fight to keep Californians safe and ensure these vital protections remain in place.”

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