On Friday, June 2, 2023, America’s Future filed an Amicus Brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Lance Boland, et al. v Rob Bonta, et al. (9th Cir. Dkt. No. 22-55276), a case which will decide the constitutionality of California’s “Unsafe Handgun Act” or UHA, a state gun statute.  Our Amicus brief, joined by seven nonprofit organizations, supports the plaintiffs’ positions and advocates for affirmance of a preliminary injunction issued by California’s central federal district court.

The plaintiffs, in this case, have challenged the constitutionality of three provisions of the UHA, arguing violations of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.  The three provisions of the state statute, at issue, are:  (1) the requirement that “certain handguns…have a chamber load indicator (‘CLI’), which is a device that indicates whether a handgun is loaded”; (2) the requirement that “certain handguns to have a magazine disconnect mechanism (‘MDM’), which prevents a handgun from being fired if the magazine is not fully inserted”; and (3) the requirement that “certain handguns have the ability to transfer microscopic characters representing the handgun’s make, model, and serial number onto shell casings when the handgun is fired, commonly referred to as microstamping capability.”

On March 20, 2023, at the trial level, California federal district court judge from the central district, the Hon. Cormac Carney applied the test set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in NY Rifle & Pistol Assn v Bruen (2022) and determined that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed at trial insomuch as all three provisions do, in fact, unconstitutionally infringe Second Amendment rights of citizens.  As a result of Judge Carney’s findings, the district court granted plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, blocking the enforcement of the three provisions, at issue.

As noted in our Amicus brief, the Act, in its current version, prohibits the commercial sale (while allowing certain private and out-of-state sales) of any semi-automatic handguns not currently appearing on California’s approved list, known as the Roster.  Our brief emphasizes the gravity of the UHA’s ban on handguns that do not meet requirements of the regulation, highlighting Judge Carney’s inescapable finding that only guns grandfathered in are capable of purchase and possession because “[n]o handgun available in the world has all three of these features [i.e. the CLI, MDM, and microstamping capability].”

Judge Carney noted that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is “so fundamental that to regulate conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text, the government must show more than the regulation promotes an important interest, like reducing accidental discharges or solving crime. Rather, to be constitutional, regulations of Second Amendment rights must be “‘consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation’.”

America’s Future agrees with the plaintiffs in this case and with Judge Carney’s opinion and opposes the UHA regulations as implicating and infringing the Second Amendment right to bear arms.  And, as stated in our Amicus brief, “no court should assume that ‘public safety’ considerations support limitations on handgun choice. There are about 21,000 firearm homicides per year nationwide, but many more defensive gun uses annually which prevent assaults and homicides.”  In fact, “a CDC survey in the mid-1990s suggested there are some 2.4 million defensive uses of guns yearly and in a 2021 study cites 17 national surveys indicating ‘between 760,000 defensive handgun uses and 3.6 million defensive uses of any type of gun per year…in 95 percent of the survey responses, the gun owner had only to brandish the weapon to defuse the attempted crime’.”

Our brief provides a historical and biblical perspective on the fundamental right to bear arms. America’s Future takes the position that the March 20, 2023, federal injunction should be affirmed and, eventually, California’s UHA should be struck down as unconstitutional, in clear violation of our Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Click here to view other America’s Future Amicus brief filings.