President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief Monday in a lawsuit against California’s ammunition controls.
Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ, announced the brief via X, making clear the DOJ’s position that California’s background check requirement re: ammo purchases “restricts the ability of Californians to keep and bear arms.”
The case is Rhode v. Bonta, which is in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on an en banc appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of California.
On January 2, 2026, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) announced that they, too, filed an amicus brief in the case against ammunition background checks.
Kostas Moros, SAF Director of Legal Research and Education, noted that California’s ammunition background check requirement cannot withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court’s Bruen (2022) test.
He said, “California’s ammunition background check regime defies Bruen by imposing a burdensome and error-prone system that rejects a large fraction of eligible purchasers, denying law-abiding citizens their Second Amendment rights without historical justification.”
