PART I: LOSING YOUR RIGHT TO OWN FIREARMS
If you haven’t heard, California is one of the most regulated, controlling and unforgiving states when it comes to owning and carrying firearms for self-defense. Every year, without fail, another legislative session spews out nonsensical and seemingly unconstitutional firearms laws. Law abiding gun owners are barraged with a succession of conflicting and confusing regulation, being told to comply with the law or lose your right to have a gun and maybe even your freedom. It does seem deliberate, the confusion is the point. Why? So you give up, don’t apply for a CCW(Carry Concealed Weapons license), don’t even buy a gun to protect your family in your home because you are worried you can’t possibly follow the law, even if you want to. Well, you can follow the law if you are informed, and these series of articles on what it takes in California to lose your CCW and even your gun rights will help you stay on the right side of the law.
The Legal and Political Landscape
All California firearms regulation must comply with the United States Constitution and court rulings. The problem is that the United States Supreme Court (USSC) takes very few firearms cases per year, so short-term (that means over the years)rulings on significant firearms issues are left to the states to legislate and the lower federal and state courts to rule on. In California, that means the Federal Ninth Circuit Court rules on all our gun rights cases, almost always to the detriment of lawful gun owners and those who believe “shall not be infringed” means what it says. The three most significant cases that the USSC have recently ruled on control the lower courts:
Heller v. District of Columbia(2008): The “big dog”, a 5-4(five justices for) ruling by the USSC that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms in a home or business. A great case for gun rights, but like all big cases it raised a lot of questions on how it will be interpreted by different courts.
McDonald v. Chicago(2010): Because Heller was from D.C., the opinion controlled the federal government and areas of federal jurisdiction. This 5-4 case simply stated that the Heller applied to the individual states and state’s gun regulations had to comply with Heller.
New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen(2022): A 6-3 expansion of the Heller case protecting an individual right to possess a firearm in public. This is the case that opened the spigot for CCW applications in California actually being granted.(For example in 2020, pre-Bruen there were under 3000 CCW holders in San Diego County, as of early 2026 there are now over 30,000.) Like Heller this case raised more questions than it settled, for example, is that open or concealed carry? Can the government regulate concealed carry? How much can they charge and how much training can they require? Nothing is ever easy, and a resolution to these simple question always takes years, if you even get a resolution.
You may be asking why, if the USSC has made it clear that the 2nd Amendment is an individual, self-owned “right” not a privilege that the government grants do they keep regulating in a way that violates Heller and Bruen? Short answer, because they can, there are no consequences for passing facially unconstitutional laws and they have a fundamentally different view of the 2nd Amendment than most lawful gun owners. They are also playing to their audience:
1: The majority of adults in California don’t own guns or live in a house with guns.
In San Diego County only about 25% of households have guns, there are about 1.2 million firearms in the county and 11.2 million in California. Just so you understand the huge difference from the rest of the country, there are about 500 million guns in the United States and California is about 11% of the United States population. Per-capita, California should have more than 50 million firearms in the state and we don’t. If the goal of the anti 2nd Amendment legislature and anti 2nd Amendment courts is to restrict the availability of firearms and drive down the desire to own or carry one through a patchwork of confusing rules and regulations, they are succeeding.
2: In California, the legislative, executive and judicial branches are hostile to the individual right to own and carry a firearm.
Each of these branches, in their own way, has made firearms ownership expensive, time-consuming, complicated, and difficult. Two recent examples are Senate Bill 2(SB-2) passed in 2024 where the legislature tried to restrict where CCW holders were allowed to carry their guns. Spoiler Alert: The restrictions included almost everywhere you went out in public, it has been referred to as the “carrying a gun concealed in a car law” because that is all you would have been able to do. Some of that law went into effect and some was ‘stayed’ or invalidated until the court process plays out. But it leaves law-abiding lawful gun owners wondering if they are doing the right thing when carrying concealed. And this year(2026) the legislature is attempting to make it so you can’t even buy a gun without taking an 8 hour class instead of the current 30 question multiple choice test. Are these legal under Heller/Bruen? Check back in a few years.
3: If you ever use a firearm in self-defense, your view of what is reasonable self-defense as a lawful gun owner will differ significantly from the view of a non-gun owning juror.
In one of our last trials involving firearms self-defense, the prosecutor kicked off the jury every gun owner. That’s wrong but completely legal, because gun owners are not a protected class when it comes to jury selection. You, with the help of an experienced firearms self-defense attorney will need to carefully determine how you are presenting the case to a jury of people who know nothing about guns and have been conditioned by their government, courts and media to believe you have done something wrong just by owning a gun.
As we go through the following series of articles trying to explain why California does what it does in regard to the individual ownership of firearms, keep these points in mind. Sometimes, the pain is the point.
