Gun group sues over suppressed blog post that gave addresses

FILE -- In this March 28, 2016 file photo is California Gov. Jerry Brown at a news conference in Sacramento. On July 1, 2016 Governor Brown singed six gun control bills that make it harder to buy ammunition and barring magazine clips that hold more than 10 rounds. less FILE -- In this March 28, 2016 file photo is California Gov. Jerry Brown at a news conference in Sacramento. On July 1, 2016 Governor Brown singed six gun control bills that make it harder to buy ammunition and ... more Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Gun group sues over suppressed blog post that gave addresses 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

A pro-gun group has filed a federal lawsuit against the California Legislature’s lawyer, saying she violated the group’s First Amendment rights by suppressing a blog post that listed the home addresses and telephone numbers of 40 lawmakers.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, a gun rights group that is funding the suit against Legislative Counsel Diane Boyer-Vine, issued a statement Friday that accuses state officials of using an “unusual and unconstitutional” law to censor what its chief says is legitimate free speech, which is covered under the First Amendment.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed six gun-control bills on July 1 that had been passed by the Legislature, making it harder to buy ammunition and barring magazine clips that hold more than 10 rounds — measures that were designed to prevent mass shootings and curb violence in cities throughout California. Gun rights activists were infuriated.

On July 5, a blogger who goes by the alias “The Real Right Winger” wrote a post characterizing the legislators as “tyrants” and “legisexuals” for passing laws that the author criticized for thwarting the rights of gun owners. Among them is a law creating a registry to track ammunition sales throughout the state.

The blogger retaliated by posting a “tyrant registry” of 14 senators and 26 Assembly members who voted to approve the gun laws, saying the people listed could be removed in only two ways: by repealing the laws, or by dying.

“These tyrants are no longer going to be insulated from us,” said the blog post, which was reprinted in the court complaint filed Friday.

In response, the state’s deputy legislative counsel, Kathryn Londenberg, sent a letter to Wordpress, which hosts the blog, demanding that it remove the lawmakers’ home addresses.

“Publicly displaying elected officials’ home addresses on the Internet represents a grave risk to the safety of these elected officials,” Londenberg wrote, citing a state law that prohibits people from posting any official’s address or phone number on the Internet.

Wordpress took down the post on July 11. In the lawsuit, the blogger seeks a court ruling that would declare the law unconstitutional.

“Our member’s truthful, non-threatening speech was attacked mere days after the elected subjects of their speech carpet-bombed the Bill of Rights in the largest legislative attack on Second Amendment rights in decades,” Firearms Policy Coalition president Brandon Combs said in the statement.

Combs and the other coalition members argued that publication of lawmakers’ addresses and phone numbers “can serve a variety of lawful purposes” — such as picketing outside the officials’ houses.

“You could imagine a world in which home addresses were highly confidential, in which they were not put in public documents — but that’s not our world,” said Eugene Volokh, the Los Angeles lawyer representing the coalition in the case.

Boyer-Vine was unavailable for comment.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan