California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office quietly signed a settlement agreement in federal court admitting that his agency’s gun registration website was so poorly designed that potentially thousands of Californians were unable to register their assault weapons and comply with state law.
Under the terms of the settlement, filed Wednesday in U.S. Eastern District Court in Sacramento, the state Department of Justice is required to notify each district attorney and law enforcement agency to put on hold “all pending investigations and prosecutions” for those suspected of failing to register their assault weapons.
The settlement agreement is a major setback for one of California’s signature pieces of gun control legislation. It comes 11 months after a federal judge said the state’s newly implemented online ammunition background check program was so glitchy that tens of thousands of legal firearms owners were barred from buying ammunition — in violation of their 2nd Amendment rights.
The settlement, which still needs to be approved by a federal judge, was filed the day before the U.S. Senate voted to approve Becerra as the new secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Agency. The Senate approved his nomination 50-49 on Thursday, with only one Republican voting to confirm him.
The problems with California’s gun registration website didn’t come up during the confirmation hearings, but critics say they should have. Becerra is now running an agency responsible for monitoring the nation’s health-care system and tracking its health-care data.
“I think what we learned from this experience in this lawsuit is that failing systems not only are acceptable,” said Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the gun rights groups that originally sued Becerra’s office. Combs said Becerra allowed “a culture to thrive that doesn’t care about people.”
In an emailed statement, an unnamed state Department of Justice spokesperson said the department “believes the proposed settlement is in the best interest of the people of California and will ensure that lawfully owned assault weapons are registered with the Bureau of Firearms.”
Under the settlement, the Department of Justice agreed to pay $151,000 for gun rights groups’ legal fees, and it is required after a 120-day public notice period to reopen assault weapon registrations for three months to give those who tried to register before the 2018 deadline time to do so without being penalized.
The settlement also requires the agency to provide gun owners with the option of filling out their registration on paper forms, instead of online.
The settlement stems from laws passed in 2016 that reclassified a number of weapons as assault rifles including those with “bullet buttons,” devices that allow a gun’s ammunition magazine to quickly disengage with the use of a small tool, usually the tip of a bullet. The legislation banned selling the weapons, but it allowed those who already possessed them to keep them so long as they registered their guns online with the California Department of Justice.
The deadline was initially in 2017, but the Legislature extended it to the following year because of the website problems.
In 2017, three gun owners and 2nd Amendment groups filed a lawsuit in Shasta County Superior Court, alleging that thousands of gun owners had tried to register their weapons on the state’s website, but the system kept crashing, and they said they received little help when they called and emailed Becerra’s office to get the problem fixed.
The law made no exception for technical errors that prevented someone from properly registering. Possessing an unregistered assault weapon is either a misdemeanor or felony. Transporting an unregistered assault weapon is a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Eventually, the case was transferred to federal court.
It’s not the first time Becerra’s office had problems with its online firearms registration and background check program. The California Attorney General’s office continues to battle legal challenges surrounding its problem-plagued ammunition background check system.
A Sacramento Bee investigation in late 2019 found that of the 345,547 ammunition background checks performed, the system kicked back 62,000 ammunition purchases because the buyer’s personal information hadn’t been entered into the state’s gun registration system.
Often, the information on a person’s identification card didn’t match what officials had entered into the California gun registry database, which retail sellers must review when they do the ammunition background check.
Some ammunition buyers told The Bee that the system was so glitchy that they ended up having to buy a new gun to get ammunition for guns they already owned. Active duty and retired law enforcement officers told The Bee that the system also blocked them from buying ammunition.
Last year, U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez in San Diego ruled there were so many problems with the system that it violated Californians’ 2nd Amendment rights.
In his ruling, Benitez wrote that in the first seven months of implementation, the system did stop 188 ammunition purchases because the buyer was a “prohibited person” who can’t legally possess ammunition. But during the same period, the system rejected purchasers who are not “prohibited persons” 16.4 percent of the time, Benitez said.
“If the state objective is to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for its law-abiding citizens to purchase protected ammunition, then this law appears to be well-drafted,” Benitez said.
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