BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation has joined four other gun rights organizations in an amicus brief supporting Olympic gold medalist Kim Rhode in her challenge of California’s onerous background check requirement to purchase ammunition.
SAF is joined by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, California Gun Rights Foundation and the Madison Society Foundation. They are represented by attorney Joseph G.S. Greenlee. The case is known as Rhode v. Becerra.
Rhode, a world-renowned competitive shooter, is a California resident. She quickly challenged the California ammunition requirement, the first such background check mandate in the country, when it was adopted. According to the amicus brief, this scheme is “complex, deficient, and ineffective.” It places a burden on every law-abiding gun owner in the state and often requires people to make two trips to the store just to purchase ammunition, and it still refuses about 16 percent of lawful purchases.
“California has some of the strictest, and over-bearing, draconian gun control laws in the nation,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “This ammunition background check requirement represents the foolishness of state gun laws at their worst.
“As we note in the brief,” he continued, “the state has offered no evidence that this background check requirement even works to prevent violent crimes involving firearms. What the law does accomplish is to inconvenience good citizens such as Kim Rhode, for whom competitive shooting is not just a hobby, but a vocation. It penalizes Kim and many other Californians who have committed no crime.”
Gottlieb said this case is important because the state’s defense of the ammunition background check is not supported by the facts, or in this case, lack of facts.
“There is simply no evidence that a background check requirement on ammunition has, or ever will, prevent a single crime involving a firearm, while placing a burden on thousands of California citizens by preventing them from buying ammunition and thus exercising their constitutional rights,” he said.