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Fairgrounds Management Corporation (the “SCCFMC”) and the owner of the
Fairgrounds, Santa Clara County. The addendum to the lease prohibited any gun shows
from being held on the fairgrounds. Nordyke 1997, 110 F.3d at 708. Similar to the instant
action, there Santa Clara County informed the SCCFMC that the county did not intend
to ban the “exchange of information or ideas about guns, gun safety, or the display of
guns for historical or educational purposes,” but it prohibited only the “selling, offering
for sale, supplying, delivering, or giving possession or control of firearms or ammunition
to any other person at a gun show at the fairgrounds.” Id. at 708-09. The ban extended
to “any act initiating any of the foregoing transactions with the intent of completing them
at a later date.” Id. at 709.
The Nordykes—plaintiffs/appellees in Nordyke 1997—were gun show promoters
who had previously operated at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds. The Northern District of
California granted the Nordykes’ request for a preliminary injunction because the
addendum to the lease violated the Nordykes’ First Amendment rights. See id. The
Ninth Circuit concluded that “the sale of firearms at a gun show at the Fairgrounds,
which is not proscribed by federal or state law, is ‘lawful activity,’ because the County has
not enacted an ordinance to prohibit such sales.” Id. at 710. In a footnote, the Ninth
Circuit explained that “we are assuming, without deciding, for the purposes of this
analysis, that the County has the power to enact such an ordinance. However, we
acknowledge that, under established preemption principles, the County may in fact lack
that power.” Id. at 710 n.3.
The Nordykes’ legal saga continued over the next two decades, when those
plaintiffs subsequently challenged an Alameda County ordinance that prohibited the
possession of firearms on county property, which would make gun shows unprofitable.
See Nordyke v. King, 319 F.3d 1185, 1188 (9th Cir. 2003) (“Nordyke 2003”); see also
Nordyke v. King, 681 F.3d 1041 (9th Cir. 2012) (detailing the action’s 12-year history
involving Alameda County). In Nordyke 2003, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed that the lease
addendum in Nordyke 1997 was “an unconstitutional infringement of commercial free
speech rights” because it “prohibited offers to sell guns,” and the Ninth Circuit
instructed that “[in] cases such as Nordyke [1997], what renders the law unconstitutional
is the interference with speech itself, not the hindering of actions (e.g., sales) that are not
speech.” Nordyke 2003, 319 F.3d at 1191. The Ninth Circuit upheld Alameda County’s
ban on firearm possession because “possession itself is not commercial speech,” and, as
such, the ordinance did “not infringe Nordyke’s right to free commercial speech.” Id.
Defendants here maintain that the instant action is distinguishable from Nordyke
1997 because SB 264 and SB 915 statutorily ban gun sales on state fairgrounds, as opposed
to the addendum in Nordyke 1997, which modified the county’s lease. Whereas the
underlying gun sales were a lawful activity in Nordyke 1997—and they were therefore
protected as commercial speech—now the State of California has passed laws prohibiting
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