Gun buyers in the Golden State no longer have to ration their purchases. At least, for the time being.
A three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order Thursday blocking California from enforcing its law limiting residents to one firearm purchase every 30 days while it hears the case. That reverses an earlier order granting a stay of a district judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional. The panel, comprised of two Donald Trump appointees and one Barack Obama appointee, did not register any dissents from the decision.
“The order granting Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal is REVERSED,” the panel’s unsigned order in Nguyen v. Bonta reads.
The ruling represents a rare win for gun-rights advocates in a typically unfavorable legal venue. Not only did the Ninth Circuit take the unusual step of revoking its own stay pending appeal, but it also did so just one day after oral arguments were held on the matter. The move could suggest the law won’t fare well in an eventual decision on the merits.
The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), who has been fighting California’s one-gun-purchase-per-month restriction in court since 2020, celebrated the reversal.
“This order allows our hard-won injunction to take effect and, unless the Ninth Circuit issues a new stay, Californians may now apply to purchase multiple firearms within a 30-day period,” Brandon Combs, the group’s President, said in a statement. “FPC intends to make Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta respect Second Amendment rights whether they like it or not.”
Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) did not respond to a request for comment.
The legal controversy began after California Governor Gavin Newsom (D.) signed Senate Bill 61 into law in 2019. The bill prohibited residents from purchasing any handgun or semi-automatic centerfire rifle from a licensed dealer if they had already acquired another handgun or semi-automatic centerfire rifle in the previous 30 days. This restriction was later expanded in 2022 with Assembly Bill 1621, which made any firearm or “precursor part” subject to the same one-per-30 days limit.
The added inclusion of monthly limits on all types of firearms made the Golden State an outlier, even among the small handful of states with similar rationing requirements on licensed gun sales. That fact, in addition to the lack of historical precedent for the restriction, led U.S. District Judge William Q. Hayes to strike down the law as unconstitutional earlier this March.
“Defendants have not met their burden of producing a ‘well-established and representative historical analogue’ to the [one-gun-a-month] law,” Hayes, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote at the time.
The California Attorney General’s office ultimately appealed and was granted a stay on Hayes’ order by the Ninth Circuit while the appeals process played out. That lasted until this week when the panel that will ultimately decide the merits of the case reversed the stay.
In court Wednesday, attorneys for California defended the law by arguing that it is necessary to help prevent “bulk purchases” that could facilitate firearms trafficking to criminals. The state also argued that reducing the rate of licensed gun purchases only impacts an individual’s ability to commercially acquire firearms, not to “keep” or “bear” them, and thus does not implicate the Second Amendment.
That argument, however, did not appear to gain much traction with any of the three judges on the panel.
“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 there’s some societal drawbacks from having protests so we want to kind of space those out,” Circuit Judge Danielle J. Forrest said. “People would say that’s absurd.”
