Litigation Highlight: Ninth Circuit Strikes Down California’s “One Gun Per Month” Rule
On June 20, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel invalidated a California law that limits most members of the general public to acquiring one firearm in any 30-day period. The Court found that the law “meaningfully constrains the right to purchase and possess firearms” and is not comparable to historical restrictions on gun acquisition. The decision in Nguyen v. Bonta is both an unusual example of the Ninth Circuit unanimously striking down a gun restriction under the Second Amendment and, potentially, a sign of greater receptiveness to Supreme Court cues at the appellate level.
Beginning in 1999, California initially restricted the number of purchase applications only for concealable handguns. However, as the Nguyen panel described, the state gradually extended the rule such that by 2024 it applied to all firearm purchases. On the purchase side, California law provides that “[a] person shall not make an application to purchase more than one handgun or semiautomatic centerfire rifle within any 30-day period.” And gun sellers face more expansive restrictions: they may not deliver a gun to a buyer if “notified by the Department of Justice that within the preceding 30-day period, the purchaser has made another application to purchase a handgun, semiautomatic centerfire rifle, completed frame or receiver, or firearm precursor part.” State law allows limited exceptions, including for law enforcement and individuals replacing lost or stolen guns. The legislature’s rationale for the limitation relates largely to concerns about straw purchasing for prohibited possessors—in other words, that bulk purchases are more likely to be made for individuals other than the actual buyer who may not be independently qualified to possess a gun.
A group of individual plaintiffs and gun-rights groups challenged the one-gun-per-month rule in 2020. Litigation proceeded slowly at the district court level, in part due to supplemental post-Bruen briefing and fact development. In March 2024, a judge in the Southern District of California granted plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and invalidated the limit. The state appealed, arguing that “(1) the Second Amendment does not guarantee a right to possess multiple firearms and (2) even if it did, restricting the frequency of purchase does not prevent someone from acquiring multiple firearms.”
The Ninth Circuit panel first evaluated whether the plain text of the Second Amendment protects the right to possess (and, thus, acquire) multiple firearms and held that it does—finding “no basis for interpreting the constitutional text . . . [to] only protect[] possession of a single weapon of any kind.” And, the panel said, the question was not whether Californians remain able to acquire more than one firearm but rather whether the state had placed “meaningful constraints on the acquisition of firearms through purchase.” The answer was certainly yes, the panel held, because regulating the frequency of exercise of a constitutional right was no more benign that regulating the right directly. Thus, the court said, California’s “monthly metering of firearm purchases meaningfully constrains the right to purchase and possess firearms and is [] presumptively unconstitutional.”
Next, the court turned to the question of whether California’s 30-day rule is nevertheless consistent with historical tradition. The panel first determined that a “more nuanced” analogical framework was not appropriate here because, while “the modern problems that California identifies as justification for its one-gun-a-month law are perhaps different in degree from past problems, [] they are not different in kind.” In support of its restriction, California offered primarily broad restrictions on the sale of firearms to disfavored groups such as Native Americans and outsiders during the colonial period. The court said that such laws could be generally “instructive on the historical understanding of gun rights and regulation,” despite their discriminatory nature. The state also relied on later-in-time licensing rules, statutes requiring sellers to keep a registry of gun transactions, and “various licensing and taxing regulations.”
These potential historical analogues, the panel said, were not analogous to California’s one-gun-per-month rule because they either “impose[d] no burden on an individual’s ability to acquire, keep, or bear arms” or applied on a much more limited basis to specific groups or to only a subset of arms. A Virginia colonial restriction that prohibited carrying more than one gun and “ten charges of powder” when traveling a distance from the colony was the closest possible analogue, the court said, but it was a single atypical restriction enacted well before the Founding. In sum, the panel determined that “the historical record makes clear that California’s one-gun-a-month law is not relevantly similar to our tradition in how it regulates firearms” and affirmed the lower court order invalidating the law. Judge Owens concurred to briefly note that the ruling “does not address other means of restricting bulk and straw purchasing of firearms, which our nation’s tradition of firearm regulation may support.”
Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke wrote in 2021 that the government enjoyed an “undefeated, 50–0 record against the Second Amendment” in the Ninth Circuit—in other words, that the circuit had upheld every gun restriction to come before it. And Judge VanDyke has frequently railed against the trend of the circuit taking panel decisions invalidating gun restrictions en banc to reverse them. That said, it’s worth watching what happens next with Nguyen to see whether this case could break that general trend. While the panel here consisted of two Trump-appointed judges, Judge Owens is an Obama appointee and his concurrence is notable. Judge Owens might have written separately to appeal to the liberal wing of the court hoping to prompt an en banc reevaluation; instead, he joined in a unanimous decision striking down the one-gun-per-month limit. One can imagine that circuit judges are taking note of the separate writings that have come down from the Supreme Court in recent months expressing skepticism about certain rulings upholding gun laws and suggesting that the justices will soon weigh in. And, if so, it wouldn’t be a shock to see the full circuit allow Nguyen to stand.
This decision also seems to be, as Judge Owens suggests, a narrow one. The court distinguished California’s regulatory approach here from purchaser licensing, a much more common policy at the state level. And, if the legislative rationale is actually to prevent straw purchasing, there would appear to be less burdensome alternatives including declarations that the guns are being purchased for personal use or a higher limit than one gun per month. From a historical perspective, California’s initial restriction of only concealable handguns might ironically be on surer constitutional footing than its post-Bruen amendment extending the one-gun-per-month rule to nearly all firearms. That’s because many states in the early-to-mid 1800s broadly restricted or banned concealed carry—including by strictly regulating the purchase of concealable weapons. California could not push that argument here given, the scope of its ban, but the state might pare back the restriction to comport with this historical tradition.