Are California Gun Laws Restricting Concealed Carry Headed For Extinction?

July 30, 2013: Guns to be melted lie in a pile near a news conference at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s 20th annual Gun Melt at the Gerdau Steel Mill in Rancho Cucamonga, California. (Photo: Reuters)

A simple procedural decision in a landmark Second Amendment case could mean the end for California gun laws that ban the issuance of concealed carry permits.

The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would bar other law enforcement officials, including state Attorney General Kamala Harris, from defending challenges to a previous lawsuit. The court said Harris and other law enforcement officials are prohibited from obtaining “intervener status” to in a case originally brought by an independent journalist who sued the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department over its policy of requiring a specific reason for being allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore has said he will not fight the ruling, leaving no one with sufficient legal standing to challenge the decision made in February.

“Since becoming Sheriff, I have always maintained that it is the legislature’s responsibility to make the laws, and the judiciary’s responsibility to interpret them and their constitutionality,” Gore wrote in a letter to the county board of supervisors earlier this year. “Law enforcement’s role is to uphold and enforce the law.”

Sheriff Gore said the court had given him sufficient clarity on his role.

Edward Peruta sued Gore’s department over its policy of requiring a specific reason for being allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, a law other counties throughout the state of California also had in place. The liberal anti-Second Amendment activists in the state have suffered a series of defeats this year.

In August, the 9th Circuit handed down a bombshell ruling that held those policies to be unconstitutional and also that law-abiding citizens have a right to bear arms under the Constitution’s Second Amendment. The court ruled that citizens could not be required to justify their reasons for carrying concealed weapons, it’s a right under the Second Amendment — plain and simple.

Still, the fight for gun rights activists isn’t over.

Despite the panel also ruling on a similar case brought in Yolo County, the county’s sheriff, Edward Prieto, has not confirmed he will drop further appeals. In the event he decides to move forward, the appeal would likely be heard en banc by all of the 9th Circuit judges or by the U.S. Supreme Court. Harris could still try to join Prieto’s case, but Wednesday’s ruling makes pretty clear she would not be allowed.

Meanwhile, other California counties have approached policy in the wake of the February decision to varying degrees, with Orange County issuing the permits on request and other counties still holding off until they’ve exhausted all legal options and a final resolution is reached.

The law would still not allow felons or the mentally ill to possess firearms, and would still prohibit the carrying of them in places such as schools and government buildings. Brandon Combs, executive director of the pro-Second Amendment Calguns Foundation, which represented the plaintiff in the Yolo County case, said he believes more counties will inevitably drop their policies of restrictions concealed-carry permits.

“Some sheriffs are probably going to see this news as evidence their policies are wrong,” he said. “But sheriffs and police chiefs in anti-gun jurisdictions may need more help seeing the light. We’ll be happy to help them, even if it means going to the Supreme Court.”