BELLEVUE, WA – Attorneys representing the Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in a federal court challenge of California’s ban on so-called “large capacity magazines” have filed a memorandum of points and authorities in support of their earlier motion for summary judgment. The case is known as Wiese v. Bonta and was originally filed in April 2017.
Joining SAF in this case are the Calguns Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation and several private citizens including William Wiese, for whom the case is named. They are represented by attorneys George M. Lee of Seiler Epstein in San Francisco, and Raymond M. DiGuiseppe at the DiGuiseppe Law Firm in Southport, N.C. The case is in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
“We filed this case almost six years ago,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “and the State of California is simply unable to justify its laws, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s new guidelines for Second Amendment challenges established last year in the Bruen ruling. We believe the court should declare this ban unconstitutional, grant summary judgment and issue a permanent injunction against the state.”
As noted in the memorandum, the magazine ban has a direct impact on the right to keep and bear arms because the banned magazines are an inherent part of, and inseparable from, scores of functioning modern semiautomatic pistol models in use by law-abiding citizens across the country. By some estimates, there may be more than a half-billion of these magazines in the United States today, so they are in common use by any definition.
“These are original-capacity magazines,” Gottlieb explained, “per the original design of the firearms for which they are supplied. Law-abiding citizens use these magazines for all sorts of lawful purposes, including personal protection, competition, home and business security, target shooting and predator control. Indeed, California law requires a magazine to be inserted into a pistol in order for it to function. The law requires many models of new pistols to have a ‘magazine disconnect mechanism’ which prevents the gun from being fired unless there is a magazine in place, in the gun.
“Simply put,” he continued, “Second Amendment protections would be meaningless if the State could strip away integral component parts of a firearm by claiming that prohibitions against individual component do not constitute a ban on ‘arms.’ For the State to contend otherwise would be absurd.”