Businessmen and gun rights advocates filed a petition with the Supreme Court to overturn a zoning law in Alameda County, California that bans gun shops from operating within 500 feet of a residential area.
Entrepreneurs John Teixeira, Steve Nobriga and Gary Gamaza attempted to open a gun shop in the city of San Lorenzo, but were met with hostility from an archaic law prohibiting the opening of the store near a residential area. This legislation is clearly an attack on the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
According to a Fox News report, Teixeira and his business partners investigated the area and discovered that not a single business in the city met with the restrictive zoning law, showing that their potential gun shop was singled out by the county.
They filed a lawsuit to allow their business to open and received widespread support from gun rights organizations such as the Calguns Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation, and California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees.
They initially won the suit in 2016 thanks to a 2-1 three-judge panel decision of the 9th Circuit which ruled that Alameda County had restricted the businessmen’s Second Amendment freedoms.
Unfortunately, their case hit a snag in October 2017 when a federal Court of Appeals made the controversial decision to uphold the zoning law, claiming that it did not violate the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights.
Judge Marsha Berzon said at the trial, “Gun buyers have no right to have a gun store in a particular location, at least as long as their access is not meaningfully constrained.”
This prompted the group to file a petition with the Supreme Court in the hope that this infringement on their rights would be overturned.
Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb explained to Fox News, “You simply cannot allow local governments to ignore the Second Amendment because they don’t like how the Supreme Court has ruled on the amendment twice in the past ten years.” He added, “You shouldn’t be able to zone the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights.”