Gun owners target assault weapons ban
San Diego County plaintiffs cite ruling in another lawsuit over magazine capacity.
SAN DIEGO — Buoyed by a court victory that overturned California’s ban on high-capacity gun magazines, a group of San Diego gun owners is now going after the state’s ban on assault weapons.
Three San Diego County residents and the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee filed a lawsuit on Thursday against California’s attorney general and the chief of the state Department of Justice’s Bureau of Firearms on 2nd Amendment grounds.
The gun owners point to U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez’s ruling in a separate lawsuit in March, which held that the state’s ban on possession of magazines that hold more than 10 bullets was unconstitutional.
If ownership of such magazines is legal, then use of them should be legal as well, argued the gun owners’ attorney, John Dillon.
The three gun owners — who also have county permits to carry concealed weapons — say they legally own either semi-automatic rifles or pistols with fixed magazines.
But if they were to remove the fixed magazines and insert high-capacity magazines instead, they would run afoul of state law by essentially turning their firearms into “assault weapons.”
Ryan Petersen, the owner of Gunfighter Tactical, a San Diego gun store, is one of the plaintiffs and also a voluntary advisory board member of the Gun Owners group. Board member Jim Miller, an El Cajon family law attorney, is another plaintiff, along with Patrick Russ.
The gun advocacy group accuses the state of branding and restricting “normal” firearms as assault weapons, an “apolitically-concocted pejorative term designed to suggest that there is an inherently unlawful or illegitimate basis for owning otherwise common firearms protected by the Second Amendment,” the lawsuit states.
The legal definition of an assault weapon has fluctuated over the years in California, but a major component bans semiautomatic rifles and pistols from having magazines that accept more than 10 rounds.
The law allows ownership of such weapons as long as they were registered by June 30, 2018, but prohibits new possession, sales, transfers and manufacturing.
The state’s ban on highcapacity magazines, passed in 2016, went a step further and banned ownership outright. Benitez wrote in his March 29 opinion that such a law “turns millions of responsible, law-abiding people trying to protect themselves into criminals.”
His opinion is being challenged in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the judge has agreed to prohibit sales and manufacturing in the state until all appeals are exhausted.
The California Rifle and Pistol Assn., the local arm of the National Rifle Assn., is the plaintiff in that lawsuit and is defending Benitez’s ruling.
The assault weapon lawsuit filed Thursday was assigned to U.S. District Judge John Houston, who like Benitez was nominated by President George W. Bush.