Four gun rights groups are suing California Attorney General Xavier Becerra over failures of the “bullet button assault weapon” registration system.
The deadline for registering “bullet button assault weapons” was 11:59:59 pm on June 30. On July 9 Breitbart News reported that numerous registrants said they had seen the personal information of other registrants while in the system. This information included telephone numbers, emails, driver’s license numbers, etc.
Breitbart News also reported that the registration requirements were structured in a way that prevented deployed military personnel from registering their “bullet button assault weapons.” This puts those personnel in a position of possibly losing their weapons and facing criminal charges.
Calguns Foundation, Firearms Policy Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, and the Second Amendment Foundation have now filed suit against the AG Becerra.
The Firearms Policy Coalition sums up the suit as “a constitutional challenge to the DOJ’s defective “bullet button assault weapon” registration system.” The suit claims the DOJ’s “failures to perform their duties…prevented many Californians from registering their firearms before July 1, 2018, thus denying them exemption from many serious criminal laws, and a petition for writ of mandate to require the DOJ to register their firearms as many individuals tried and intended to do before July 1.”
Second Amendment Foundation founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb sent a press release to Breitbart News in which he said, “It’s like a bad version of ‘Catch-22.’ The government required registration by the deadline, but the online registration failed and people couldn’t register. They’re required to obey the law, but the system broke down, making it impossible to obey the law. Now these people face the possibility of being prosecuted. We simply cannot abide that kind of incompetence.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, 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.