California Wants Gun Mag BAN Case to Go Away, Not So Fast Freedom Haters

BELLEVUE, WA – Attorneys for the Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in a long-running legal challenge of California’s magazine ban statute have filed a memorandum in support of their motion for summary judgment and opposition to the state’s counter-motion for a summary judgment. The case is known as Wiese v. Bonta, originally filed in 2017.

SAF is joined by the Calguns Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, and several private citizens. They are represented by attorneys George M. Lee at Seiler Epstein LLP in San Francisco and Raymond M. DiGuiseppe at DiGuiseppe Law Firm in Southport, N.C. The case is in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

“California has been stubbornly defending what amounts to a confiscatory effort to deprive state residents of magazines which are commonly owned by millions of citizens across the country,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “Following the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling last year, the state has doubled down with its gun control efforts, and defending this indefensible magazine ban is a major component of what amounts to a campaign of resistance which the courts should not allow.”

“We’ve been in this fight for six years,” noted SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The state has now resorted to absurd arguments that concede an inherent operating part of a firearm is an ‘arm’ only so long as it holds an arbitrarily determined number of rounds, but suddenly becomes something else if it holds more. As we explain in the text of our memorandum, nothing in the Second Amendment supports the state’s position on drawing these random lines to determine whether something is an ‘arm’ or not.

“Last summer’s Supreme Court ruling in the Bruen case established a new directive for handling Second Amendment cases, which now require that challenged gun laws must be supported by historical traditions, and the state cannot do that in this case,” he added.

The 28-page memorandum also notes;

“Therefore, the common use of an arm overrides any decrees or policy judgments of the State as to what its citizens ‘really need’ for purposes of exercising their constitutional right to keep and bear protected arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes. And it is beyond any reasonable dispute that the magazines at issue are commonly owned, both here in California and throughout the United States.”