Pilloried! Cali Sued for Sharing Gun Owners’ Private Information

Pictured: California Gun Owners Face Mainstream Media, c. 2021, colorized

Did you know that California’s state university system is part of their law enforcement agencies now?

Last year the powers that currently run the state of California realized that, despite their best efforts, Californians were buying guns in record-setting numbers. As is tradition in California, those same powers that be took a very long look at their state constitution for a solution. (By “took a long look,” we mean that California’s governor took that Constitution into the smallest room of his home, then he used it to clean up after himself before he flushed.)

The result was a very stupid law that requires California’s Department of Justice to share all of the data it receives on California gun owners with the California Firearm Violence Research Center. The CFVRC is run out of Cali’s UC university system, and the data being shared is for non-law-enforcement purposes. This is contrary to the state constitution, and therefore the Second Amendment Foundation is suing the state Attorney General, Bob Bonta. Below is SAF’s searing brief.

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Joining SAF in this action are the Firearms Policy Coalition, California Gun Rights Foundation, San Diego County Gun Owners PAC, Orange County Gun Owners PAC, Inland Empire Gun Owners PAC and Doe Brandeis, a private citizen. They are represented by attorneys Bradley A. Benbrook and Stephen M. Duvernay with the Benbrook Law Group, PC in Sacramento. The lawsuit is known as Brandeis v. Bonta.

The lawsuit contends disclosure of personal information about California gun owners under provisions of Assembly Bill 173, passed by the Assembly last year, violates their privacy rights, which are specifically protected by the state constitution. This information sharing also violates provisions of Proposition 63, the ammunition background check measure passed by voters back in 2016, which specified that personal information was to remain confidential, and shared “only for law enforcement purposes.”

“This is clearly an attempt violate the law, and the constitutional privacy rights of California gun owners for reasons we could only begin to imagine,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “This proves once again that gun prohibitionists are willing to trample on laws they previously passed with a new law that violates the rights of gun owners for the alleged purpose of so-called ‘research,’ the nature of which seems dubious at best.

“In their zeal to treat California gun owners as second- or even third-class citizens, anti-gunners in Sacramento forget that those citizens have rights including the right to privacy,” Gottlieb added. “More than 4 California million gun owners have a reasonable expectation that their personal information is protected by the law and the state constitution. We will not stand idly by while their privacy is violated under the guise of research that has nothing at all to do with law enforcement.”