BELLEVUE, WA – -(AmmoLand.com)- The Second Amendment Foundation and four other rights groups have joined in a lawsuit against the State of California for preventing individuals from exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Joining SAF are the Firearms Policy Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, the Madison Society Foundation and the Calguns Foundation. They are supporting individual plaintiffs Paul McKinley Stewart and Chad Linton, who contend that non-violent felony convictions years ago have been set aside or vacated, yet the State of California refuses to allow them to purchase firearms.
The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Named as defendants are California Attorney General Xavier Becerra; Martin Horan, the chief of the state Department of Justice, Bureau of Firearms; and Deputy Attorney General Robert Wilson. The case is known as Linton v. Becerra.
“SAF took an interest in this case for the specific reason that California once again is trying to prevent or disqualify as many citizens as possible from exercising their Second Amendment rights,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “There doesn’t appear to be any other reason for the state to not recognize rights restorations to either Linton or Stewart even though their rights have been restored by courts in Arizona and Washington.”
Attorney George M. Lee, who represents the plaintiffs, observed, “The State (California) doesn’t get to pick and choose which judgments of other states it will honor, and which it will ignore, because it doesn’t approve of firearms ownership. Granting full faith and credit to other court judgments is part of the bargain of being one of these United States.”
The cases involving both individual plaintiffs happened decades ago, and have been cleared by courts the states in which they occurred. Both plaintiffs have been good citizens in their respective California communities.
“This is just another example of California’s animosity toward the Second Amendment,” Gottlieb said.
The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group focusing on the Constitutional right and heritage to privately own and possess firearms. Founded in 1974, The Foundation has grown to more than 650,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control.
All of commiefornia should be plastered with signs that say “gun free zone” just like our public schools.
Granting full faith and credit to other court judgments is part of the bargain of being one of these United States. Therein lies the problem, they are not “one of these United States” and have not been for a long time.
i believe that self preservation is what the 2nd amendment is all about. to be against the 2nd is to be against individual rights & true freedom. God Bless the USA
You put it in a nutshell. Just right. People have no rights at all, except as a wishful moral principle, if they are unable or unwilling to defend them. Without strength of their own, people become helpless slaves of the strong.
Hopefully, sooner than latter a suit will find it’s way to the Supreme Court and we’ll see if we have friends there or if we got screwed (again).
Yep, CA laws are confusing and restrictive yet the crime rate continues to soar. Seems the criminals are able to do more with less. They must be smarter out there.
Seems the criminals are able to do more with less One possible interpretation, but as I pondered your statement something else came round in my cranium to better explain it: Since the California gummit are such lawbreakers themselves (on many levels and concerning many issues) they have set some standards…. and those standards promote lawlessness. Thus it would seem the criminals, so designated, are merely imitating the other criminals, not yet so designated, and doing as they do. How else to explain it? I think of their former senator Leland Yee, a rabid anti gun (in the hands of the… Read more »