On January 9, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) filed a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court of the United States to review a decision from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld Alameda County’s zoning policies against gun stores.
SAF is joined by the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, Calguns Foundation, Inc., and three businessmen: John Teixeira, Steve Nobriga, and Gary Gamaza.
The request for SCOTUS intervention comes after a back-and-forth in the Ninth Circuit that initially resulted in a three-judge panel’s ruling against the zoning ordinance. On May 16, 2016, Breitbart News reported the three-judge panel’s position that “the right to purchase and to sell firearms is part and parcel of the historically recognized right to keep and to bear arms.” This was reversed when the court reheard the case en banc so SAF and the other plaintiffs are asking SCOTUS to step in.
According to an SAF press release on the request for a SCOTUS review, SAF founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb said, “You shouldn’t be able to zone the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights.”
He alluded to pro-gun SCOTUS rulings in District of Columbia v Heller (2008) and McDonald v Chicago (2010) by adding, “You simply cannot allow local governments to ignore the Second Amendment because they don’t like how the Supreme Court has ruled on the amendment twice in the past ten years.”
California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees executive vice president Brandon Combs said, “The Supreme Court declared that the Second Amendment was not a second-class right, but lower courts are ignoring that and holding otherwise—and so far, they’ve been getting away with it. We hope this case gets individual liberty back on track.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.