The bottom line
I am not a Pam Bondi fan. Her record as Florida AG speaks for itself: she helped pass red flag laws, championed raising the long gun purchase age to 21, and defended those laws in court when the NRA sued. That history does not disappear because she now runs DOJ. But on January 5, 2026, the DOJ she leads filed an amicus brief in Rhode v. Bonta at the Ninth Circuit calling California’s ammunition background check requirement “straightforwardly unconstitutional.” Then it went further. The DOJ has been granted argument time to physically stand up in court and argue against California’s ammo ban. That has never happened before in American history for a Second Amendment case at the district court level. You have to call that what it is: a genuine win, even if the person holding the pen has a mixed record at best.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What California’s ammo law actually does to gun owners
Before getting into why the DOJ’s involvement matters, it is worth spending a moment on what California’s ammunition background check system does in practice, because it is genuinely one of the most burdensome gun regulations in the country.
Under laws stemming from Proposition 63, passed by voters in 2016 and expanded by the legislature in 2019, California gun owners must pass a background check for every single ammunition purchase. Not once when you first buy a firearm. Not annually. Every time. If you drive across state lines, buy ammunition legally in Nevada, and bring it home to California, you are required by law to ship it to a licensed California ammunition vendor first, who then runs a background check and hands it back to you before you can have it. You pay a fee for this privilege. If you buy ammo at a range, it is only exempt from the background check requirement if you use every round at that range during that same visit.
The system has predictably failed law-abiding gun owners at an absurd rate. During the first seven months after implementation in 2019, over 100,000 law-abiding Californians were rejected when trying to buy ammunition, representing roughly 16% of all purchase attempts. The overwhelming majority of those rejections were not prohibited persons. They were people with name mismatches, address discrepancies between their ID and their firearms registration, or simply no record in California’s Automated Firearms System because they had purchased their gun before the registry existed. Only 0.03% of buyers were correctly denied because they were actually on a prohibited persons list. The system is designed to fail legal gun owners and succeed at doing exactly that.
The DOJ brief put the human cost of this bluntly: “California’s burdensome barriers have achieved their goal. Over a third of law-abiding citizens rejected in January 2022 still had not purchased ammunition six months later.” Read that carefully. The state of California managed to prevent law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights for at least six months by running them through a system that rejected them without cause.
The case and where it stands
Rhode v. Bonta is named in part for Kim Rhode, one of the most decorated American Olympic shooters in history, a six-time medalist who needs to buy large quantities of ammunition to train. The case is backed by the NRA and the California Rifle and Pistol Association.
A district court struck down the ammo restrictions in January 2024, finding they violated the Second Amendment. California appealed. A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the district court on July 24, 2025, applying the text-and-history framework from NYSRPA v. Bruen and finding the restrictions had no historical analogue that could justify them. California then petitioned for rehearing en banc. The full Ninth Circuit granted that petition on December 1, 2025, vacating the panel decision and scheduling en banc oral arguments for the week of March 23, 2026, in Pasadena.
En banc review is where the Ninth Circuit historically buries pro-gun decisions. The full court has a reliably anti-gun composition and uses en banc rehearings to relitigate outcomes it dislikes. The two prior victories for the plaintiffs have now been vacated. This is where the DOJ’s entry into the case genuinely changes the math.
Why the DOJ’s brief is unprecedented
On January 5, 2026, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief in Rhode v. Bonta calling the California law “straightforwardly unconstitutional.” The brief, submitted by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, and Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris, argues that California’s system burdens the core right protected by the Second Amendment, restricts access to the ammunition that makes a firearm operable, and has no historical precedent that survives Bruen scrutiny. The brief draws a direct line between the state’s stated intent to deter gun ownership through regulatory friction and a per se constitutional violation.
A coalition of 26 states filed a separate 31-page amicus brief on the same side, led by Ohio AG Dave Yost and Idaho AG Raúl Labrador.
The filing of an amicus brief by DOJ against a state gun law is rare in itself. But the DOJ has now been granted time by the plaintiffs to physically stand up and argue at the en banc oral arguments. That is something different. Having DOJ lawyers in the room, allocated argument time, actively arguing against California’s law in front of the en banc panel, gives the pro-gun position institutional weight that no private litigant or outside advocacy group can replicate. It signals to every judge on that panel that the federal government considers this law unconstitutional and is willing to say so from the podium.
I understand the argument that DOJ has gone both ways on the Second Amendment under this administration and that the pattern has not been a clean win streak. That argument is accurate. The Rahimi outcome at the Supreme Court was a disappointment for a lot of people, and there are ongoing concerns about where DOJ stands on federal firearm restrictions versus state ones. The NFA has not been touched. The Hughes Amendment is still intact.
But here is how I think about it. The DOJ under Harmeet Dhillon has been making a strategic calculation about where to put its limited litigation resources. The current Supreme Court makeup is far more likely to strike down state gun laws than federal ones. Bruen was explicitly about state laws. The string of cases DOJ has weighed in on, Wolford v. Lopez in Hawaii, the Massachusetts handgun roster case, the LA County Sheriff carry permit case, this California ammo case, are all state-level restrictions where the Bruen framework gives the strongest footing. That is not abandoning the NFA fights. It is picking battles where a win generates the clearest precedent and affects the most people.
The Bruen framework is the key
The reason this case matters beyond California is what a ruling here sets as precedent for how courts apply Bruen to ammunition restrictions specifically.
Bruen requires that any firearms regulation be grounded in the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the founding or the Reconstruction amendments. The government defending a regulation must produce historical analogues. California cannot produce a founding-era law requiring background checks to purchase ammunition because no such thing existed. Gunpowder and shot were sold freely. There was no licensed vendor requirement. There was no government database against which purchases were checked. The entire regulatory apparatus California built is a modern invention with no historical grounding.
If the en banc court rules for the plaintiffs under that framework, it establishes clearly that ammunition restrictions are subject to the same Bruen analysis as firearms restrictions and must meet the same historical analogue standard. That ruling would reach every other state that has tried or is considering similar ammunition regulations. It would make it functionally impossible to pass a new state-level ammo background check law anywhere in the country and have it survive judicial review.
That is why the DOJ chose this case. It is one of the cleanest Second Amendment wins available under current doctrine. The law is maximally burdensome to law-abiding gun owners. It fails law-abiding people at a 16% clip while stopping almost no prohibited persons. It has no historical parallel. The DOJ can win this case without stretching the doctrine at all.
Giving credit where it is due
I am going to keep saying Bondi has a bad record because she does. The red flag laws she championed in Florida following Parkland are unconstitutional prior restraints on gun rights. Raising the long gun purchase age to 21 strips young adults of rights the Second Amendment guarantees them. She defended both positions in court. Those facts do not change because her department did something right on January 5th.
But part of being honest about this issue means saying when something good happens, even when the person doing it is not someone you would have picked for the job. The DOJ filing an amicus brief calling a state gun law unconstitutional is good. The DOJ securing argument time to stand up and say that in court is historic. Those two things are both true at the same time.
What I keep coming back to is that Harmeet Dhillon is running the Civil Rights Division, and she has been explicit about her goal: every state regulation inconsistent with Heller and Bruen should be struck down, settled, or withdrawn by the time she leaves her post. She is hiring specifically for the Second Amendment section. She is picking cases that generate durable appellate precedent. She is filing in district courts around the country. The Rhode v. Bonta intervention is one node in a coordinated litigation strategy, not an isolated event.
The en banc panel will hear argument on March 23rd. Whatever your read is on Bondi, the DOJ that files a brief calling California’s ammo law “straightforwardly unconstitutional” and then shows up in court to argue it is doing something right. That is worth saying out loud.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.