NRA Drops Effort to Fight Gun Law : Weapons: The organization abandons its two-year challenge of California’s ban on military-style assault arms for fear U.S. Supreme Court would not hear case.

Fearing that the U.S. Supreme Court would refuse to hear its case, the National Rifle Assn. has quietly abandoned its two-year federal challenge of the California ban on military-style assault guns, a top NRA executive said Monday.

Advocates of gun control said the NRA’s failure to pursue the action represented a “major victory” for their side. But the NRA called it only the “end of Round No. 1.”

The NRA had intended to use the California appeal as a way to obtain from the Supreme Court a definitive ruling on wider legal issues of gun control. Richard Gardiner, legislative counsel of the NRA, said the organization of about 2.5 million gun owners now plans to restart its efforts to attack the constitutionality of the ban in California courts, which were bypassed the first time around.

“This doesn’t mean we are dropping the issue by any means,” Gardiner said of the decision by the NRA to abort its challenge of the 1989 state law.

California’s controversial Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 drew national attention for in effect banning the civilian possession of certain unregistered semiautomatic firearms. It was the kind of law the NRA fears the most since it goes beyond regulation to actually banning possession of some weapons.

Advocates for gun owners argue that the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. For years, the NRA has maintained that local, state and federal legislative bodies have chipped away at that right.

Gun control proponents and some legal scholars argue that the amendment is cast in terms of arming citizens for militia duty and does not guarantee the wider right to bear arms favored by the NRA. In the context of this legal dispute, they say the NRA decision to drop the California challenge is a huge retreat.

“The NRA has thrown in the towel on the 2nd Amendment,” Sarah Brady, chairwoman of Handgun Control Inc., said. “ . . . In this case, the gun lobby’s inaction speaks louder than its words.”

“The NRA’s failure to seek Supreme Court review in this case amounts to an unconditional surrender by the gun lobby on the 2nd Amendment,” said Dennis Henigan, an attorney for Handgun Control’s affiliate organization, Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.

The California law was enacted a few months after five children in a schoolyard at Stockton were murdered by a deranged drifter named Patrick Purdy, who also wounded a teacher and 29 other youngsters. Reloading twice, he fired some 105 bullets from an AK-47 into the play yard before killing himself.

Even before the legislation became law 3 1/2 years ago, the NRA targeted it for defeat in the courts. From the outset, both sides of the gun control controversy pegged the assault gun restrictions as a case they expected to reach the Supreme Court for a possible definitive ruling on gun owner rights.

The NRA asserted that individual states may regulate “certain aspects” of the right to keep and bear arms but they cannot prohibit its exercise altogether. The organization argued that the 2nd Amendment and the “due process” clause of the 14th Amendment protect the right to keep arms. The California law infringes on the rights provided by both, the NRA said.

The NRA lost first at the trial level in the U.S. District Court in Fresno and, again, before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case then was carried to the Supreme Court by the NRA, but dropped at the deadline Thursday.

Gardiner said the case had not fully “percolated” through the federal court system and was not ready for Supreme Court review. He noted that it had been dealt with by only two federal courts and had not been fully exposed outside California.

Gardiner said the NRA feared that if the court had refused to hear the case, the news media and Handgun Control would have portrayed it as a major setback for the NRA. “Given the current state of the issue, we didn’t want to deal with that,” he said.

In an aggressive recruiting campaign for new members during the past year, NRA representatives had cited the case against the California law as an example of the organization’s efforts to fight for gun owner rights. Gardiner conceded that the legal reasoning behind the decision to drop the challenge would be difficult to explain to NRA members.

Basically, the California assault gun law makes it illegal for civilians to import, buy, sell, loan or possess about 70 kinds of high-capacity semiautomatic rifles, shotguns and pistols. Violation of the law can result in a prison sentence.

But the law permitted citizens who already legally owned the weapons at the time the law was passed to register and keep them. So far, some 60,500 have been registered with the state Department of Justice, although many thousands more are believed to be unregistered.

Gardiner agreed that the NRA assigned special attention to challenging the California law, but on Monday downplayed the notion the case was designed to bring the wider issue of gun owner rights before the high court.

“The whole intention was to defeat the law and have the law struck down,” he said. “This was not necessarily to be the case to go to the Supreme Court.”

However, when the NRA brought an appeal before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court, a spokesman said the case represented “a piece of history” that would show that states lacked the constitutional authority to enact gun control laws.

California Deputy Atty. Gen. Daniel G. Stone said of the NRA’s decision, “It certainly was a surprise to me. They advertised this as their landmark case, flagship case, last-hope case.”

Gardiner said NRA legal strategists will turn their challenge to the law to the state courts in California, although he said it had not been decided what features would be attacked under the state Constitution.

Senate leader David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), Senate author of the bill, doubted a successful challenge by the NRA in state courts. “I can’t imagine what arguments they would use in state courts that they didn’t use in federal courts,” Roberti said.