From Judge Larry Alan Burns' decision today in Doe v. Bonta (S.D. Cal.):
Five California registered gun owners have filed suit to prevent Rob Bonta, Attorney General of the State of California, from enforcing a California law that permits the State to disclose their personal identifying information to bona fide research institutions for the ostensible purposes of preventing gun violence, shooting accidents, and suicide….
The gun owners, all of whom are law abiding citizens who passed background checks, raise four claims. First, they argue that AB 173 violates—or at minimum, chills—their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Second, they maintain that disclosing their personal identifying information to non-government researchers violates privacy protections guaranteed to them by the Fourteenth Amendment. Next, they assert that AB 173 violates their right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment by retroactively expanding access to their restricted personal information. Their final claim, applicable only to applicants for concealed weapon permits ("CCW") and holders of such permits, is that federal law preempts AB 173 insofar as AB 173 authorizes disclosure of their social security numbers to third parties in derogation of the federal Privacy Act of 1974….
The court rejected the Second Amendment challenge:
