The Firearms Policy Coalition, or FPC, is one of the groups garnering significant wins for your Second Amendment rights in our courts. They’re taking on anti-gun regulations and they’re winning.

For example, they took on a California law that would make plaintiffs foot the bill for any challenge to gun control regulations there in the state along with several other gun rights groups.

It was a blatant attempt to chill legal challenges against their blatantly unconstitutional anti-gun efforts.

In what feels like a pretty ironic twist of fate, FPC is having its legal bills on that challenge paid.

Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that United States District Judge Roger Benitez has approved a $556,957.66 stipulation for attorneys’ fees stemming from its lawsuit that successfully challenged the fee-shifting provision in California SB 1327, which was enacted as retribution for Texas’s SB 8 abortion law in order to suppress legitimate challenges to firearms regulations. The order in Miller v. Bonta (Miller II) can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

“The unilateral fee-shifting provision of SB 1327 was intended from the onset to chill the exercise of constitutional rights by threatening to bankrupt those that sought to protect them,” said Bill Sack, FPC Director of Legal Operations. “The irony is not lost on us that now it is the state of California paying our legal bills as a result of their attempted unconstitutional trickery.”

FPC is joined in this lawsuit by the San Diego County Gun Owners PAC (SDCGO), the California Gun Rights Foundation (CGF), and the Second Amendment Foundation.

This is just beautiful, isn’t it?

So California decided to quell challenges to their gun control laws and, as a result, were sued and are now paying someone else’s legal bills for the challenge.

There’s a poetry there that cannot be overstated.

At the core, there was no way California lawmakers could have been so deluded to think they’d get away with such an effort. This was nothing but a blatant attempt to chill the rights of people to challenge unjust laws in the courts, something California lawmakers themselves wouldn’t blink at doing if they thought a law was wrong.

In other words, they were being blatant hypocrites who somehow thought gun control laws were above more plebian regulations that they’d be more than happy to challenge.

Another irony in this is that if they were so convinced that gun control actually is constitutional, they didn’t have anything to worry about. The laws in question would have stood, regardless of FPC or anyone else challenging them in court.

Instead, they likely knew they wouldn’t and wanted to protect them.

Now, they’re footing the bill for groups like FPC and the Second Amendment Foundation.

This is one of those moments where I can’t help but feel like good will ultimately triumph over evil because we just saw it happen. Unfortunately, that’s probably overstating things here because there are still plenty of gun control laws on the book in the state and while groups like FPC are more than happy to challenge unconstitutional gun control laws, there’s only so much they can do at one time.

But at least they’re not having to foot the state’s bills while doing so.