The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Monday ruled that that the Second Amendment right of gun buyers extends to protect gun retailers from being excluded from an area.
The ruling was based on the challenge to an Alameda County, California ordinance that stated that a gun store must be located at least 500 feet away from any residentially-zoned district, elementary, middle or high school, pre-school, day care center, another firearms retailer or an establishment where liquor is sold or served.
However, according to a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) study of all of Alameda County, there are no parcels in the county that meet the ordinance’s mandates. The plaintiffs argued the regulation was tantamount to an outright ban.
Three Second Amendment activist organizations praised the opinion of the case known as Teixeira, et al. v. County of Alameda.
The plaintiffs in the case included three individuals who wanted to open a new gun store in Alameda County. They were joined by pro-Second Amendment groups: The Calguns Foundation, California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, and the Second Amendment Foundation.
“Today, the Court appropriately reminded the County that civil rights can’t be outlawed through piles of regulation. We look forward to securing Second Amendment rights through this case and many others to come,” concluded Brandon Combs, executive director of The Calguns Foundation. “We’re very happy to see the Court take a very principled and reasoned approach to protecting the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms.”
Writing for the majority, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain said that the “right of law-abiding citizens to keep and to bear arms is not a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees…”
“If the right of the people to keep and bear arms is to have any force, the people must have a right to acquire the very firearms they are entitled to keep and to bear. Indeed, where a right depends on subsidiary activity, it would make little sense if the right did not extend, at least partly, to such activity as well….Alameda County has offered nothing to undermine our conclusion that the right to purchase and to sell firearms is part and parcel of the historically recognized right to keep and to bear arms,” O’Scannlain wrote.