Several Second Amendment groups and individual gun owners have filed a lawsuit challenging a new California law imposing an 11% excise tax on firearms and ammunition as an unconstitutional assault on individual rights.
The Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, National Rifle Association of America and other plaintiffs filed the lawsuit July 2 in San Diego County Superior Court. The legal challenge to California’s Assembly Bill 28, which was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, contends the excise tax singles out gun owners for disfavored treatment.
“The National Rifle Association has a record of challenging laws that needlessly abridge the rights of law-abiding Americans," Randy Kozuch, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s executive director, said in a comment provided to the Southern California Record. “California's firearms excise tax is a blatant and egregious attack on the rights of Californians and a calculated maneuver to dismantle the Second Amendment.”
The law, which took effect July 1, earmarks the funds raised through the 11% tax on retail sales of firearms, firearms parts or ammunition for gun violence prevention, education, school safety and research programs, according to the Legislature’s analysis of the measure.
“California’s 11% excise tax is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen … because it implicates conduct protected by the Second Amendment’s plain text and is not part of this nation’s history of gun regulation,” the lawsuit states.
In enacting the law, the state seeks to stamp out the constitutional right to own firearms by slapping a special tax on it, according to the complaint.
“If this tax is permitted, there is nothing stopping California from imposing a 50% or even 100% tax on a constitutional right it disfavors – whether it be the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free exercise of religion or any other right,” the lawsuit says.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to impose a judgment that the excise tax violates the right to keep and bear arms, a permanent injunction stopping the enforcement of the tax provision in AB 28 and reimbursement for the costs of the lawsuit and reasonable attorney fees.
The Firearms Policy Coalition singled out Newsom for his role in enacting the new law.
“California’s unconstitutional and immoral gun tax is a modern Jim Crow law that targets people and rights hated by tyrants like Gov. Gavin Newsom,” the FPC’s president, Brandon Combs, said in a prepared statement. “Thankfully, the Constitution forbids California's political warfare scheme. FPC and our allies are committed to restoring the right to keep and bear arms in California and throughout the United States.”
The Second Amendment Foundation, another plaintiff, argued that allowing the law to stand would lead California to impose other taxes on individual rights it opposes.
“We contend in the lawsuit that this 11% tax is unconstitutional because it literally taxes conduct protected by the Second Amendment,” the foundation’s founder and executive vice president, Alan Gottlieb, said in a prepared statement. “There is no analogous evidence such a tax was ever applied at the time of the Founding era, as required by the 2022 Supreme Court Bruen ruling.”
The California Attorney General’s Office said it will review the lawsuit and respond in court..