“What are the 50 historical laws dating from 1789 to 1868 that the Attorney General has compiled as potential historical analogues? One would expect to find laws or ordinances that required a gunsmith to check with the local sheriff before selling a firearm. Or one might expect to find laws that restricted gunsmiths from selling to any customer who was a stranger in his community. Or perhaps there would be historical laws uncovered requiring a customer’s proof of citizenship before a merchant was allowed to sell him gunpowder. These could be apt analogues to demonstrate a related historical tradition of constitutional regulation.
Nothing like this appears in the State’s compilation of laws. The State’s compilation lists 48 laws which made it a crime to possess a gun and ammunition by Negros, Mulattos, slaves, or persons of color, and two laws that prohibited sales to Indians. For example, the Attorney General lists a 1798 Kentucky law which prohibited any “Negro, mulatto, or Indian” from possessing any gun or ammunition. An 1846 North Carolina law offers another example wherein it was prohibited to sell or deliver firearms to “any slave.” This is the third time the Attorney General has cited these laws in support for its laws and restrictions implicating the Second Amendment. These fifty laws identified by the Attorney General constitute a long, embarrassing, disgusting, insidious, reprehensible list of examples of government tyranny towards our own people.”
and,
“In the end, the State has failed to carry its burden to demonstrate that the ammunition background check laws “are consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” as required by Bruen. Bruen cautions, “courts should not ‘uphold every modern law that remotely resembles a historical analogue,’ because doing so ‘risks endorsing outliers that our ancestors would never have accepted.’” 597 U.S. at 30. A
sweeping background check requirement imposed every time a citizen needs to buy ammunition is an outlier that our ancestors would have never accepted for a citizen. Therefore, California’s ammunition background check system laws are unconstitutional and shall not be enforced.” – U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez, from his 32-page ruling in Rhode v. Bonta, January 30, 2024