It's a lawsuit brought by some gun owners in California who don't like that the Legislature recently passed a law that says that identifying information about who has a concealed carry permit or who buys various ammunition -- which is already collected by the state and disseminated to a plethora of law enforcement officials -- also gets to be used (though kept confidential) by specific academic centers at UC Davis and Stanford "created to do research on firearm violence, in order to inform
policy and assist the legislature in enacting appropriate
legislation." Plaintiffs say that violates the Second Amendment.
It's not surprising that someone decided to bring that lawsuit. Some people really like their guns, and some people really don't like any government involvement with them at all. So pretty much anyone would have predicted that once California passed the underlying statute, some gun owner somewhere would sue.
Similarly, it's not surprising that plaintiffs lost. Both in the district court -- on a motion to dismiss -- and in the Ninth Circuit. Without dissent (and even with Judge Bumatay on the panel). There's surely a right to informational privacy at some level, but the biographical information at issue isn't all that intimate, and it's protected from public dissemination anyway, and the text of the Second Amendment only covers the right to bear arms, not to keep the stuff secret from a Legislatively-chosen group of researchers who are helping the Legislature draft policy, particularly when numerous other public officials already have unchallenged access to this same information. You can read more in the Ninth Circuit opinion as to why plaintiffs lose, but, honestly, the result shouldn't surprise anyone. Plaintiffs would lose even in the current Supreme Court; fairly clearly, in my opinion.
The only thing that surprised me, though, was who was suing.
The plaintiffs themselves are John Does. That makes sense; the whole point of their lawsuit is that they don't want to be identified.
I strongly suspected that their counsel would be one of the especially-active public interest groups that commonly take on these types of cases. Either Second-Amendment-specific groups that like to file even the most aggressive litigation or the usual conservative public interest firms.
Nope. The attorneys on this case are from . . . Snell & Wilmer.
Sort of off brand for a regular near-AmLaw100 firm, right? Particularly if it's pro bono. You'd think they'd go for more traditional help-the-needy stuff. Certainly rather than a fairly-clearly-losing Second Amendment fight, I would have thought.
Anyway, that's the only unusual thing here. Otherwise, pretty much how everyone would expect this thing to go.
