Patriot Brief
A Ninth Circuit panel ruled California’s open-carry ban violates the Second Amendment under Bruen.
The majority held that open carry is historically protected and part of America’s legal tradition.
California may appeal, but the ruling exposes how far the state has drifted from constitutional limits.
For years, California has behaved as if the Second Amendment were a suggestion — something to be negotiated, managed, or quietly ignored until the courts got tired of pushing back. On Friday, the Ninth Circuit reminded the state, yet again, that constitutional rights are not optional, and they don’t disappear just because Sacramento finds them inconvenient.
The ruling wasn’t subtle. Writing for the majority, Judge Lawrence VanDyke made it clear that California’s 2011 ban on open carry doesn’t survive even the most basic scrutiny under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Bruen didn’t invent new law — it reaffirmed old law. If a modern gun restriction can’t be justified by historical tradition at the time of the Founding or the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, it fails. Period.
And California failed spectacularly.
The historical record, as VanDyke noted, is not ambiguous. Open carry was not some fringe practice tolerated on a technicality. It was the default lawful means of carrying arms for much of American history — and still is in a majority of states today. That alone demolishes the idea that California’s near-total prohibition fits within any legitimate constitutional tradition.
What makes this case especially damning is how nakedly cynical California’s system has been. The panel allowed the state’s open-carry permit requirement to remain — but not without pointing out the obvious: California admits it has no record of issuing even a single open-carry license. Not one. That’s not regulation. That’s denial by bureaucracy. It’s the same shell game gun-control states have played for decades — keep the “right” on paper while making it impossible to exercise in reality.
This is exactly what Bruen was meant to stop.
Judge Kenneth Kiyul Lee joined the majority for a reason. The courts are no longer indulging the fiction that states can nullify rights through hostile administration. You don’t get to comply with the Constitution by misleading citizens about how to apply for permits or by creating processes designed never to succeed.
The dissent, authored by N. Randy Smith, reads like an echo from an older era — one where courts bent over backward to accommodate “public safety” arguments untethered from constitutional text or history. Bruen closed that door, and states like California are still banging on it.
Of course, California will appeal. It always does. The en banc Ninth Circuit remains hostile territory for gun rights, and the state will try to bury this ruling under layers of procedure and delay. But the direction of the law is no longer in doubt.
This decision isn’t radical. It’s corrective. It restores a right that never should have been stripped away in the first place. And it sends a message California has resisted hearing for years: the Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and courts are done pretending otherwise.
From Breitbart:
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that California’s ban on open carry of handguns runs afoul of Bruen (2022) and violates the Second Amendment.
The Los Angeles Times noted that the panel issued a 2-1 ruling in which Trump appointees Lawrence VanDyke and Kenneth Kiyul Lee voted in the majority. George W. Bush appointee N. Randy Smith was the dissenting judge.
VanDyke wrote the opinion for the panel, noting that California’s ban–which was adopted in 2011–fails the Bruen test, which requires modern day gun controls to be demonstrably supported by founding-era law and intention.
He wrote, “The historical record makes unmistakably plain that open carry is part of this Nation’s history and tradition. It was clearly protected at the time of the Founding and at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
VanDyke also pointed out that open carry is the “default lawful means” of carrying a firearm in a majority of states around the Union.
KCRA pointed out that the Ninth Circuit panel let California’s open carry permit requirement stand, but not without criticism, noting, “California admits that it has no record of even one open-carry license being issued, and one potential reason is that California has misled its citizens about how to apply for an open-carry license.”
California can appeal the ruling, asking for the Ninth Circuit to hear the case en banc.
Photo Credit: Erich Schlegel/Getty