• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 7, 2025

A federal appellate panel on Monday blocked enforcement of a California law that would have prohibited firearms companies from drawing on minors' personal information for advertising.

"The state may not selectively burden otherwise-lawful speech in the name of protecting privacy," 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges N. Randy Smith, Kenneth Lee, and Lawrence VanDyke wrote in an unsigned opinion.

The judges' move comes in a challenge to a 2022 California law that attempted to regulate gun advertising. The law prohibited ads for gun-related products “in a manner that is designed, intended, or reasonably appears to be attractive to minors," and also prohibited gun companies from harnessing minors' personal information in order to market guns to them.

The magazine Junior Shooters (which focuses on weapons-related activities and products) and others, including the gun rights group Second Amendment Foundation, challenged the law as unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder in the Central District of California initially rejected the magazine's argument.

The magazine appealed to the 9th Circuit and, in 2023, that court said the law likely violated the First Amendment by banning truthful ads about firearms. The judges returned the matter to Snyder for further proceedings.

Snyder subsequently blocked enforcement of the part of the statute that banned gun ads to minors, but not the provision prohibiting use of minors' personal information for advertising.

Junior Shootersagain appealed to the 9th Circuit, which said on Monday that its earlier decision actually blocked enforcement of the entire law -- including its restrictions on the use of minors' data.

The judges specifically said that the restriction on using minors' personal data "suffers from the same constitutional flaw" as the ban on ads, adding that the curb on data use "is a content-based restriction that the government has failed to justify."

California's attorney general argued that the ban on the use of personal data was a privacy regulation that should be subject to a different analysis than the ban on ads.

The 9th Circuit rejected that argument, writing that even if the provision was considered a privacy regulation, it would be content-based -- and therefore unconstitutional.

The data-use provision "clearly targets only gun-related advertising and marketing, and there is nothing to indicate that it will materially advance any governmental interest," the judges wrote.