San Francisco Tries End-Run Around Second Amendment

The City by the Bay—“on behalf of” California—sues ‘mom and pop’ firearms accessories companies across the country. Dylan Saunders, owner of one such shop, 7.62 Precision, is fighting back.

By Dave Gahary

San Francisco officials recently made news for vowing to protect “undocumented” (read: illegal) immigrants by refusing to order local law enforcement to assist in enforcing federal immigration law and sued the Trump administration over its order to cut off federal funds to sanctuary cities. Now they have a new target in their sights: the Second Amendment.

Dennis J. Herrera, first elected city attorney of San Francisco in 2001, is the most well-known champion of same-sex marriage in the Golden State. Today, he wants to make a name for himself by capitalizing on the many alleged massacres that have been frothily reported by the fake news media.

A week after his attack on the president’s plan to rein in the rampant illegal immigration, Herrera filed suit on Feb. 9 against five named and 50 unnamed companies selling “magazine repair kits” to California residents, who have had their Second Amendment rights severely limited by gun control-crazy politicians.

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Magazine repair or rebuild kits are new magazines that have been opened, disassembled, and packaged for shipping and are used to repair existing magazines, create limited-capacity magazines, or otherwise assembled and used in accordance with local laws and restrictions.

On the first page of the 34-page complaint, the lawsuit evokes several so-called massacres that have ostensibly occurred in this country over the past decade.

American Free Press sat down with the owner of one of the five named companies, Alaska-based 7.62 Precision, to discuss the lawsuit.

Dylan Saunders, who “grew up in Alaska mostly in bush villages without electricity or running water” and “spent some time in the U.S. Army as a cavalry scout and later as a sniper in an infantry unit,” lives in Wasilla, Alaska, where former Gov. Sarah Palin was mayor for six years.

“I was injured in Iraq and came back trying to figure out how to support my family,” Dylan told AFP. “So I started doing what I knew, and that was working with firearms as a way to try to pay the bills.”

Listen to AFP’s interview with Dylan Saunders by clicking the image below:

He added, “Several weeks ago I was very surprised to get a knock at my door at about 10:30 in the evening and receive a summons stating that I was being sued.”

Saunders explained how he got tangled up in this lawsuit.

“California some years ago passed a law that prohibited most people in California from purchasing what they call a ‘large capacity magazine,’ which would be anything larger than 10 rounds,” Saunders explained. “In the language of that law, they clearly allowed for magazine repair kits to be sold to residents of California, in order to keep grandfathered magazines working. Magazines are consumable items in firearms. They wear out, and they’re usually one of the first components to wear out. So, in order to keep a firearm running you need to be able to repair your magazines since they couldn’t replace them.”

When California banned magazine repair kits a few years ago, Saunders stopped selling them.

However, Herrera’s legal staff had simply accessed an old web page from Saunders’s website, where ordering the kits is impossible. Once published on the World Wide Web, all pages remain accessible, even pages and websites that no longer exist.

“Had they simply called me and asked if they could order one from me or even called me and told me that it was the attorney for the city of San Francisco,” Saunders said, “I would’ve been willing to prove to him that I was not selling these kits and had not intended for that page to be visible. But instead of getting that, they simply sued.”

Saunders suspects there is another agenda at play here.

“It’s pretty obvious that their intent is not to keep people from selling magazine kits in the state of California. Their intention is to attack firearms companies and try to put them out of business,” Saunders said. “That’s why they’re using lawsuits rather than criminal charges. In the case of criminal charges, they would have to prove that a crime had been committed, while they can bring a lawsuit and hope to bankrupt a company without actually having to win the lawsuit, without having to provide proof. A lot of companies would just fold as a result.”

Instead of folding, Saunders fought back, by tapping into what is called crowdfunding, by which a project (in this case, legal fees) is funded by raising money collectively from a large number of people across the world.

“These guys were going to get a default judgment if I couldn’t retain a law firm, so what I did was I established a GoFundMe campaign,” Saunders explained. “I was blown away that people from all over the United States jumped in. I think it was less than a week we’d raised $10,000, which was our goal.”

Saunders has retained a top-notch law firm thanks to the donations, and is still overwhelmed by the support.

“We had people donating hundreds of dollars,” he said. “I was expecting that people would donate $15, $20, $25, and maybe some people would go big and donate $50, but I was just blown away by the support, both monetary and by people sending messages and saying, ‘We’re pulling for you in this.’ It really says something about our country and about shooters across the country.”

Dave Gahary, a former submariner in the U.S. Navy, prevailed in a suit brought by the New York Stock Exchange in an attempt to silence him.