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Category: California
California gun owners have long been besieged by a lengthy list of unjust, unconstitutional firearm laws that make practicing their Second Amendment right more difficult. And a new law that just took effect is going to make freedom even more scarce in The Golden State.
The new law, passed by the legislature last year and signed by anti-gun Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, required credit card networks to make a new firearm-specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) available to banks and other financial institutions by Monday.
At issue is a special MCC for gun and ammunition purchases adopted last year by the International Organization for Standardization. MCCs are used by payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) and other financial services companies to categorize transactions.
Prior to the creation of the specific code for guns, firearms retailers fell under the MCC for sporting goods stores or miscellaneous retail. If the new code is used, credit card companies and other payment processors can tell the purchases were firearms, basically creating a de facto registry of firearms and firearm owners.
While many find that distasteful—even illegal—California Democrats and Newsom embraced the idea. Consequently, for any firearms or ammunition now purchased in California with a credit card, there is a record kept that it was for a firearm or related product.
As NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action has pointed out in the past, collecting firearm retailer financial transaction data amounts to surveillance and registration of law-abiding gun owners. Those promoting this scheme are in favor of firearm and gun owner registration. Consequently, it should be assumed that the goal of this program is to share all collected firearm retailer MCC data with government authorities and potentially private third parties that might include gun control organizations and anti-gun researchers.
Being able to know if a purchase was for a gun or ammo must sound like a great idea to Newsom and his gun-ban cronies, and a few other states have passed similar laws, including Colorado and New York. However, just as with many gun-related issues, while California seeks to punish gun owners, many states have sought to protect them from such overreach as the use of the new gun-specific MCC. In fact, more than a dozen states have passed laws outlawing the uses of such codes, including nine states—Indiana, Utah, Wyoming, Kentucky, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Delaware—just passed such measures this year.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
Further bolstering the case against the state of California for restricting gun purchases to one a month, the National Rifle Association has filed a brief with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in the lawsuit challenging that law.
In the case Nguyen v. Bonta, plaintiffs argue that the law restricting firearm purchases to no more than one every 30 days is a violation of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. In March, a U.S. District Court ruled the law to be unconstitutional, but the state—never opposed to wasting citizens’ tax dollars—appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court.
In the brief, the NRA argues that the law violates the Second Amendment because the right to “keep and bear” arms includes the right to “acquire” firearms.
“This Court has twice held that the Second Amendment protects the right to acquire arms,” the brief stated. “This Court’s prior holdings are supported by Supreme Court precedent. First, the Supreme Court has determined that ‘keep Arms’ in the Amendment’s text means to ‘have weapons,’ and the plain meaning of ‘have’ encompasses the act of acquisition. Second, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that certain rights are implicit in enumerated guarantees. In the Second Amendment context, four Justices have recognized—and none have disagreed—that firearms training is ‘a necessary concomitant’ of the right to keep and bear arms. As this Court, the Third Circuit, and many district courts have recognized, acquiring a firearm must be a necessary concomitant as well.”
The brief further argues that multiple gun purchases per month were common in early America, and there were no historical limitations on the number of firearms that law-abiding citizens could purchase—a fact the government must prove under the new Bruen standard.
“The State argues that a more nuanced analogical approach is required because historically firearms were too laborious to manufacture and too expensive to purchase for firearms to be available for bulk purchase,” the brief stated. “In fact, firearms were ubiquitous in early America, and affordable enough for every militiaman and many women to be required to purchase one or several firearms. Indeed, newspaper advertisements regularly offered large quantities of firearms for sale.”
Further bolstering that point, the brief continued: “In any event, California does not merely prohibit “bulk” purchases; it prohibits the purchase of even two firearms in one month. Americans commonly purchased multiple firearms in a single transaction in the colonial and founding eras—and no law ever forbade it.” The brief also pointed out that the state “failed to provide a single historical law limiting how many firearms someone could purchase in a month. Nor did the State provide any founding era regulation.”
In the end, the brief calls for the circuit court to affirm the earlier district court ruling that the law is unconstitutional.
