The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has submitted an amicus brief to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals supporting the federal lawsuit filed against California’s effort to ban gun shows at the Orange County Fairgrounds, and more broadly, state-owned property.
CCRKBA is joined by the Independence Institute. They are represented by attorneys David Kopel at the Independence Institute and Joseph G.S. Greenlee at Greenlee Law in McCall, Idaho. The case is known as B&L Productions v. Gavin Newsom. A lower court granted plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, and CCRKBA and the Independence Institute are asking that the Ninth Circuit affirm the lower court ruling.
“Our brief is really a look at history,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “We have detailed gun regulation in this country dating back to before the Revolutionary War, and our brief explains how the state has failed to provide a single Founding-era restriction on firearms commerce. Instead, the state has offered examples of 17th Century laws preventing arms sales to hostile foreign nations, along with a Dutch law and a census law dating back to 1631. None of these are analogous to the issue at hand.
“In addition,” he added, “we note in our amicus brief that none of the prohibited venues qualify as so-called ‘sensitive places.’ The state simply cannot declare a place to be ‘sensitive’ simply because large numbers of people congregate there, and this would definitely apply to a county fairgrounds. Their arguments suggest the state is grabbing at straws because they have nothing better.
“Gavin Newsom and other officials in Sacramento are determined to evade the Supreme Court ruling in Bruen, along with earlier high court doctrine in an effort to ignore rights secured by the Second Amendment,” Gottlieb observed. “Their stubborn resistance to comply with the high court’s ruling in 2022 simply affirms what we have known all along. California’s one-party rulers are determined to cling to their power over the citizens, no matter what the consequences to individual rights.”
