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These are perilous times for gun owners in California.
The constant stream of anti-gun laws and regulations out of Sacramento can turn law-abiding gun owners into criminals.
It’s become so overblown, so complicated, that law enforcement will arrest gun owners for non-existent crimes.
Prosecutors, the supposed backstop, will pursue charges and seek pleas or convictions where no crime actually occurred.
A  gun owner’s life could be ruined for merely being at the wrong place at the wrong time--and being a gun owner.
That was the case for Sacramento resident John Le.

The Calguns Foundation takes a robust approach in defending the Second Amendment. In addition to our pro-civil rights litigation efforts, we have defended law-abiding gun owners from non-existent crimes they were charged with.
That’s right. Not only do we have to challenge existing laws, but we have to challenge the prosecution of crimes that never occurred, based on laws that were never written.
View Le’s story and see how his life was almost turned completely upside down for simply driving as a gun owner.
These efforts are not easy or inexpensive. We hope that after hearing Le’s story that you join the cause and contribute what you can so that CGF can continue defending gun rights and ensuring justice for all law-abiding gun owners.
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Earlier this year, we told you about our major Second Amendment victory at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Teixeira v. County of Alameda, where the three-judge panel held that if "the right of the people to keep and bear arms is to have any force, the people must have a right to acquire the very firearms they are entitled to keep and to bear.”
And the consequences of our major pro-gun win are already showing up in lower courts.
Nearly 6,000 miles away from California’s Golden Coast, a federal judge recently struck down several of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands’ gun control laws, including their registration scheme, a restriction on the caliber of long guns, an “assault weapons” ban (laws very similar to California’s SB 23 “evil features” ban), a ban on open carry of a handgun, a $1,000.00 excise tax on handguns, and a policy that seized firearms upon importation.
In her ruling, Chief Judge Ramona Manglona of the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands (who was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico School of Law) cited to Teixiera, saying that “The Second Amendment protects the right to armed self-defense, which includes the right to acquire such arms….The reason is simple: without the arms, the right would be useless.”
Thanks to your support, our legal action program is already restoring Second Amendment freedoms not just in California, but even thousands of miles away.
And we want to keep moving the Second Amendment forward, just like we have been.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation of $50, $25, or whatever you can today so we can keep fighting and winning for you and our Constitutional rights.
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If you’ve ever wondered when would be a good time to give to The Calguns Foundation, right NOW would be a good time.
Although it’s been a disappointing summer (to say the least) for gun rights activists, CGF has multiple pro-Second Amendment lawsuits working their way through the legal system that could take away the anti-gunners’ momentum.
Currently, we are entrenched in these ongoing, important lawsuits that seek to:

• Strike down the DOJ's Handgun Roster and microstamping.


• Eliminate the 10 Day Waiting Period for CCW licensees and current gun owners.


• Allow gun dealers to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech in non-misleading advertising.

In addition to our legal work in the courts, we’ve revamped our education and research efforts.
We are currently assembling our county-by-county CCW database via our Sunshine Initiative, where we will analyze county sheriff’s policies and practices and see whether they’re infringing on your civil rights.
We’re also in the production stages of our new documentary series, where we tell the stories of successful CGF plaintiffs from our previous cases, illustrating that with the right team we CAN make a difference in Second Amendment litigation.
September is ending...it’s time to wake up.
Make a contribution to our pro-gun programs TODAY.
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In a recent letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, attorneys for plaintiffs Jeffrey Silvester, Brandon Combs, The Calguns Foundation, and the Second Amendment Foundation argue that a new gun control law passed this year undermines the State’s defense of the ‘waiting period laws’ struck down by federal District Court Judge Anthony Ishii following a 3-day bench trial.
Silvester v. Harris, a federal Second Amendment challenge to California’s 10-day waiting period, is pending a decision by the three-judge Ninth Circuit panel that heard oral arguments in the case in February.
Earlier this year, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1235, authored by Kevin de León, which (in part) requires that the Department of Justice implement an ‘instant’ point-of-sale background check process for ammunition purchases that relies on the State’s “Automated Firearms System” firearm and gun owner registry as well as its database of known armed and prohibited persons, also known as “APPS”.
By utilizing this method, SB 1235 says it will “ensure that only law-abiding, responsible Californians who appear in the Automated Firearms System are able to purchase ammunition for their legally owned firearms while violent felons and the dangerously mentally ill who appear in the Armed Prohibited Persons System are not.”
Unfortunately for Kamala Harris, those legislative findings don’t square with her arguments in Silvester.
In our 10-day waiting period case, the State has repeatedly argued that its systems are so unreliable and deficient that they still need a full 10-day waiting period for individuals who have a CCW issued by a sheriff or police chief, a Certificate of Eligibility issued by the Department of Justice, and those who already have firearms registered to them and are not prohibited persons.
At trial, we proved them wrong.
And if the background check system mandated by SB 1235 – which is, in essence, the same system the District Court ordered the DOJ to implement for known gun owners – is good enough to keep ammunition out of the hands of “violent felons and the dangerously mentally ill,” why wouldn’t it work for guns, too?
The answer is: It would.
You can read our letter to the Ninth Circuit here.
Donate today to assist the brief.
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A paper funded by The Calguns Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition examining whether Assault Weapons Bans can survive ‘rational basis’ scrutiny in the courts has been published in ConLawNOW.
The author, Clayton Cramer, is a noted historian whose work was cited in both District of Columbia vs. Heller and McDonald vs. Chicago.
Cramer concluded that “There is no way to hold that AW bans which deny a fundamental right, as Heller determined the Second Amendment to protect, survives the ‘rational basis’ standard of scrutiny.”
Legislation will pass the rational basis test, Cramer explains, if the court finds it is “rationally related to a legitimate state interest.” Because AW bans apply to a segment of firearms that are among the least criminally used, are arbitrarily applied, call for irrational punishment lengths, and target a politically unpopular class of people, they are not rationally based.
While the bans (such as California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989) cite a threat to the health, safety, and security of the public as justification for their existence, the banned weapons are seldom criminally misused. In a study performed to assess the effectiveness of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, the authors had a difficult time “’discerning the effects of the ban’ at least partly because ‘the banned weapons and magazines were rarely used to commit murders in this country” before the 1994 ban.’”
AW bans focus primarily on name and model numbers rather than functional characteristics, since weapons banned are “functionally indistinguishable from sporting arms that have been used for more than a century by civilians in the U.S. with semiautomatic, detachable magazine feed." This arbitrary application of the law makes such bans vulnerable to an equal protection challenge.
Also, the lack of distinctive qualities makes it difficult to define specifically what an assault weapon is. In fact, Steve Helsley, a California DOJ official, wrote in a 1988 memo:

“Consequently, I believe that assault weapons cannot be defined in a workable way, by size, caliber, action type or magazine capacity. . . . Unless a realistic definition can be developed for ‘assault weapons,’ we should leave the issue alone.”

Cramer also found that the punishments associated with violating California’s AW ban (either the possession or the importation of an assault weapon) involve lengthier prison terms than possession of a machine gun, possession of a hand grenade, or forcible rape.
In addition, those crafting AW bans often display a “bigotry” toward gun manufacturers and owners, indicating that the pursuit of AW bans could be motivated by bias. After he signed the SAFE Act in 2013, New York Governor Cuomo essentially told the law’s opponents they weren’t welcome in his state:

“Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

You can read the entirety of Cramer’s study here.
Please consider contributing today to further sponsor future Second Amendment-related studies.
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