Ninth Circuit Shoots Down California’s Background Checks for Ammunition Purchases
As violent criminals escape attention and the First Amendment comes under fire.
by Lloyd Billingsley
July 31, 2025, 9:19 PM
California’s law requiring background checks to purchase ammunition is unconstitutional, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week. Firearms are useless without ammunition and California’s law “constrains the right to keep operable firearms,” wrote Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta in the panel’s majority opinion.
California’s 2016 Proposition 63 required background checks to ensure that those seeking to purchase ammunition “are not prohibited persons.” It didn’t exactly work out that way.
The background checks went into effect on July 1, 2019. By December 2019, California had run 345,000 background checks and rejected 62,000 Californians legally entitled to purchase ammunition, including off-duty sheriff’s deputies purchasing shotgun shells to hunt ducks. Officials blamed glitches in the system, but for Ari Freilich of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the system was working as intended, as a “red flag” law allowing seizure of weapons from those who have committed no crime.
California’s background check law also required ammunition dealers “to collect and report information — such as the date of the sale, the buyers’ identification information, and the type of ammunition purchased — to DOJ [department of justice] for storage in a database for two years.” In effect, this turns ammunition retailers into government snoops, a trend in California.
In 2016 Gov. Jerry Brown tucked $5 million into the state budget for the Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis. Garen Wintemute, director of the center, claimed to be “driven by data, not by a policy agenda,” and told reporters the center’s first project would be “a survey that looks at who owns guns, why they own them and how they use firearms.”
The new center also targeted those who sell guns, claiming that cities with increases in gun purchases also experience more gun-related injuries. State officials’ zeal to stop “gun violence,” identify gun owners, and restrict the sale of ammunition is not matched by vigilance against violent criminals.
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https://spectator.org/ninth-circuit-shoots-down-californias-background-checks-for-ammunition-purchases/
