The Ninth Circuit just delivered a clean, unanimous takedown of California’s one-gun-a-month law — and the reasoning is as airtight as it gets. On June 20, 2025, a three-judge panel in Nguyen v. Bonta, No. 24-2036, affirmed summary judgment for the plaintiffs and held that California’s statute prohibiting the purchase of more than one firearm within any 30-day period facially violates the Second Amendment. Three to zero. No dissent. No wiggle room.
The Text Settles It
California’s core argument was, frankly, embarrassing. The state contended that the Second Amendment only guarantees the right to possess a single firearm, and that because most plaintiffs already owned at least one gun, their rights hadn’t been infringed at all. The panel made short work of that:
“The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms — plural. This guarantees the individual right to possess and carry weapons, plural. California’s interpretation would mean the Second Amendment only protects possession of a single weapon of any kind. There is no basis for interpreting the constitutional text in that way.”
That’s the opinion citing District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). The text of the Second Amendment says “arms.” Not “an arm.” This should not require three judges and fifteen pages to explain, but here we are.
Ancillary Rights and the Acquisition Question
The panel then addressed whether the right to acquire a firearm is even protected by the Second Amendment, given that the word “acquire” doesn’t appear in the text. My answer has always been yes — and the court agreed. The ability to acquire a firearm is a necessary precondition to the right to keep and bear one.
The panel drew on Ezell v. City of Chicago, 651 F.3d 684 (7th Cir. 2011), where the Seventh Circuit recognized that the right to train with a firearm — also not expressly mentioned in the constitutional text — is nonetheless protected because training is so intertwined with keeping and bearing arms that it functions as a concomitant right. By the same logic, the right to purchase a firearm is at minimum as fundamental as the right to train with one. You cannot keep and bear arms you cannot acquire.
Once the panel established that California’s restriction implicates the text of the Second Amendment, the burden shifted to the government under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). And California had nothing to offer.
No Historical Tradition — Period
California tried to justify its law by arguing that gun trafficking is a modern problem demanding modern solutions. The panel rejected this entirely and turned the history argument against the state. The court examined colonial-era laws restricting arms sales to Native American tribes, pre-Civil War restrictions on selling weapons to hostile parties, and other founding-era regulations — none of which imposed any limit on the quantity of firearms a law-abiding citizen could purchase in a given time period.
The founders were fully aware that firearms could be trafficked, diverted, or misused. They chose not to address that concern by restricting how many guns a citizen could buy per month. That deliberate omission is not an oversight — it is the tradition. As the panel noted, a single historical outlier does not establish a tradition, and California couldn’t even produce an outlier.
No Right Gets Rationed
Perhaps the most powerful passage in the opinion addresses the constitutional absurdity of California’s “rationing” theory:
“We are not aware of any circumstances where government may temporarily meter the exercise of constitutional rights in this manner. And we doubt anyone would think government could limit citizens’ free-speech rights to one protest a month, or their right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures to apply only to one search or one arrest per month. If the frequency with which constitutional rights can be exercised could be regulated in this manner without infringement, what would limit government from deciding that a right need only be available every six months or once a year or at any other interval it chooses? California had no answer to this concern at oral argument.”
That is exactly right. The First Amendment argument writes itself: could the government tell me I can only publish one article per month? Can they cap church attendance at once a week? The answer is obviously no — and the same logic applies here.
What Comes Next
Do I think California Attorney General Rob Bonta will seek en banc review or petition the Supreme Court? I highly doubt it. The opinion is tight, the reasoning is grounded in Heller and Bruen, and this is not a case the state wins at the next level. California’s one-gun-a-month law — originally enacted in 1999 for handguns and expanded to all firearms by 2024 — is dead.
This is the Second Amendment working as designed. A unanimous panel, applying the correct constitutional methodology, reached the only defensible result. A win is a win.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.