A coalition of gun-rights advocacy organizations have filed a lawsuit challenging a new law in San Diego banning so-called "ghost guns."
The lawsuit was filed Thursday in a San Diego federal court a few hours after Mayor Todd Gloria signed the Eliminate Non-Serialized Untraceable Firearms (ENUF) ordinance into law.
Plaintiffs sought to block enforcement of the law's ban on possessing, purchasing, selling and transporting unfinished firearm frames and receivers without serial numbers, as well as unserialized firearms all together, otherwise known as ghost guns.
The "do-it-yourself" guns may be assembled at home and thus sometimes do not have commercial serial numbers attached, leaving them untraceable by law enforcement, state and federal gun regulators.
Plaintiffs to the suit were the Firearms Policy Coalition, the San Diego County Gun Owners PAC and individual San Diego residents James Fahr, Desiree Bergman and Colin Rudolph. They alleged the ENUF ordinance violated San Diegans' Second Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution.
"The right of individuals to self-manufacture arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes is part and parcel of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms," said Adam Kraut, Senior Director of Legal Operations for the Firearms Policy Coalition.
Courts have disagreed with Kraut's interpretation of constitutional law. In July, a federal judge in Nevada struck down a similar suit filed by the Firearms Policy Coalition, finding that a state ban on ghost guns did not infringe on the right of Nevadans to keep and bear arms, as they could still purchase fully furnished firearms as well as at-home firearm assembly kits so long as those weapons were equipped with serial numbers.
The text of the ENUF ordinance reflected its Nevadan counterpart in its specific ban on unserialized weapons and weapon-assembly kits. A spokesperson for the office of San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert, who authored the bill, confirmed that the law was narrowly tailored to prohibit untraceable guns.
Nevertheless, Kraut has insisted ENUF was "such a broad prohibition against the exercise of constitutional rights, untailored in any way."
Von Wilpert proposed the ENUF ordinance in response to a reported uptick in the use of ghost guns in San Diego and across the United States. San Diego police have alleged that a deadly shooting in the downtown Gaslamp Quarter carried out in April was committed with a ghost gun. The department has also disclosed that nearly 20 percent of firearms seized in connection with crime in San Diego this year were ghost guns.
Absent a court injunction, the ENUF ordinance will go into effect Oct. 23.
