Gun rights
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
A group of firearms civil rights groups and individual gun owners have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on so-called “large capacity” magazines, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
The lawsuit was filed by the Second Amendment Foundation, Calguns Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition and Firearms Policy Foundation.
The complaint is a “constitutional challenge to California Penal Code § 32310, as recently amended by Senate Bill 1446 and Proposition 63, and Penal Code § 32390 (the ‘Large-Capacity Magazine Ban’),” according to a press release from the Firearms Policy Coalition.
The lawsuit alleges that if these measures are enforced as applied, they would “individually and collectively prohibit law-abiding citizens from continuing to possess, use, or acquire lawfully-owned firearms, in common use for lawful purposes such as self-defense (inside and outside the home), competition, sport, and hunting.”
The case is known as William Wiese, et al. v. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, et al.
“What we see in the enactment of such laws,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “is continued erosion by the state of its citizens’ constitutional rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment. When the U.S. Supreme Court incorporated the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment under the 2010 McDonald ruling, it automatically should have stopped this kind of prohibition.
“The State of California’s ban scheme stands for the proposition that most any personal property can simply be taken away from you or forced out of your possession without due process or just compensation by legislative fiat,” CGF Chairman Gene Hoffman added. “Today it’s firearm magazines, but tomorrow it will most certainly be some other constitutionally-protected private property.”
“California’s magazine laws will turn many thousands of good, law-abiding people into criminals but do nothing to advance public safety,” noted Brandon Combs, president of FPC and chairman of FPF. “While California’s political leadership might prefer some kind of police state without any Second Amendment or property rights, we believe that the Constitution takes their policy preferences off the table. This lawsuit is one of many that we hope will help restore fundamental freedoms in the Golden State and across the nation.”
Attorney George M. Lee, with the plaintiffs’ San Francisco law firm Seiler Epstein Ziegler & Applegate LLP, asserted that the ban violates the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens in several ways. He is joined by co-counsel Douglas A. Applegate from the same law firm.
“Not only does the ban infringe on Second Amendment rights,” Lee said, “but it is clearly now a taking of private property. In fact, as we contend in the complaint, it amounts to a de facto confiscation.”
Gottlieb suggested that the ban “amounts to a backdoor form of confiscation, in part, of bearable arms that are protected by the Constitution.” He said enforcement of the ban “would immediately place thousands of law-abiding California gun owners in jeopardy of criminal liability and subjects their personal property to forfeiture, seizure and permanent confiscation.”
According to the plaintiffs, the state Department of Justice has acknowledged there are “likely hundreds of thousands of large-capacity magazines in California at this time” and that the “Department therefore expects many gun owners to be affected by the new ban.”
