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.”
Moros added, “History shows no tradition of such invasive and inaccurate checks on ammunition purchases, and we urge the Court to affirm the district court’s ruling striking down this unconstitutional barrier.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.