Gun dealers, NRA sue over ‘nonessential’ designation.
Gun rights coalition cites White House advisory that shops can stay open during outbreak
A group of firearms dealers, local residents and gun rights organizations, including the NRA, has filed a federal lawsuit against a host of Bay Area public officials demanding that gun stores — ordered closed as nonessential businesses under the region’s shelter-in-place orders to slow the spread of COVID-19 — be allowed to reopen immediately.
Filed Tuesday with the U.S.
District Court for Northern California, the lawsuit is centered on the claim that the shuttering of gun stores by Bay Area counties is a violation of Second Amendment rights. It came on the same day that a six-county Bay Area coalition extended the regional stay-at-home order to May 3, in which gun stores again were not classified as essential businesses like grocery stores and banks, which are allowed to remain open.
President Donald Trump’s administration also issued over the weekend a nonbinding advisory calling gun dealers an essential business that should be allowed to stay open during the national emergency.
“California’s local governments cannot simply suspend the Constitution. Authorities may not, by decree or otherwise, enact and/or enforce a suspension or deprivation of constitutional liberties,” the suit reads. “And they certainly may not use a public health crisis as political cover to impose bans and restrictions on rights they do not like.”
A spokesman for Alameda
County Sheriff Greg Ahern, who was named in the suit, offered a sharp retort to its claims Wednesday.
Closing the gun stores “was never a Second Amendment issue; this was an issue of public health,” Sgt. Ray Kelly wrote in an email. The Sheriff’s Office closed down a Castro Valley gun store last month after finding people lined up to buy guns as the coronavirus crisis worsened.
“The business was not assisting in the fight against COVID-19 and was actually