Here’s a puzzle to figure out: In California, it is illegal for gun store owners to display an ad featuring a picture of handguns outside their business. But it’s not illegal for someone else—say, a gun control advocate—to post an identical picture of handguns outside the gun store. It’s also not illegal for those same gun store owners to buy an ad with a picture of handguns and run it somewhere else, away from their store property.
How does any of this make sense? After years of discontent, the store owners have filed suit demanding an answer.
The advertising ban has been part of California’s penal code since 1923. California’s Department of Justice allowed the lawsuit to proceed since no other states are enforcing similar laws, according to Reason’s report. Other states do have comparable legislation, including Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C., but generally do not enforce them.
“The sale of handguns is not only legal — it is constitutionally protected,” the brief reads. “The First Amendment protects truthful, non-misleading commercial speech promoting lawful products or services, but especially when the products or services are themselves protected by other constitutional rights…”
The suit points to advertising for controversial, but legal, services like abortion and contraception. Bans on advertising for both have been struck down by the Supreme Court, along with bans on advertising liquor and gambling.
The suit accuses the California law of violating the First Amendment in multiple ways: first, “it prohibits firearms dealers from disseminating truthful, nonmisleading commercial information about a lawful, constitutionally protected product.”
It is also “content-based”; shops are allowed to post ads for rifles, for example, or shotguns. Only handguns are banned from display.
The suit further alleges that the ban unjustly singles out firearms dealers, which amounts to “speaker-based discrimination.” Under the current law, anti-gun protesters could legally display images of handguns in posters calling for gun control or warning consumers against purchasing firearms. The firearm dealers would be banned from using identical imagery, simply because of their profession.
“I run one of the most heavily regulated and inspected businesses in existence, but it’s still illegal for me to show customers that I sell handguns until after they walk in the door,” gun store owner Michael Baryla told Fox News earlier this month. “That’s about as silly a law as you could imagine, even here in California.”
