In 1990, New Jersey passed a law banning over 30 named “assault firearms” and any weapons “substantially identical” to those named. The law had a few other nuances that also limited gun buyers’ and owners’ rights. At the same time, New Jersey banned all magazines with a capacity of more than 15 rounds.
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In 2018, New Jersey amended the law to ban all magazines holding more than 10 rounds. It was that amendment that finally spurred legal action, in the form of a lawsuit filed by the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, Inc., Blake Ellman, and Marc Weinberg.
Yesterday, that, insofar as the law affects rifles, it’s unconstitutional, as is the limit on magazine sizes. It remanded to the trial court a ruling (presumably a similar one) on other semiautomatic weapons and magazine bans. This is a huge Second Amendment victory.
It’s important to understand, as few gun-grabbers do, that semiautomatic weapons are not machine guns, where a single pull on the trigger unleashes a fusillade of bullets that stops only when you remove your finger from the trigger. Instead, because of a spring-loaded action in an attached magazine holding the bullets, a semiautomatic allows the user to fire a single bullet with each pull of the trigger without pausing to manually load the next bullet into the chamber.
Each bullet reflects a conscious thought, although one not slowed by manually racking each bullet, reloading the weapon, or spinning a cylinder. The larger the magazine, the more individual pulls on the trigger you can make before you must remove the magazine and replace it with another. If you’re good, replacing magazines barely slows you down:
Most people aren’t this good. If they’re in a dangerous situation against multiple assailants, especially those immune to pain because they’re hopped up on drugs, having a large-capacity magazine may well be the difference between life and death.
New Jerseyans had tolerated the 1990 situation, but the ten-round magazine ban was the last straw. Hence, the lawsuit.
The state defended itself by saying that it had a right to protect citizens from weapons it deemed unreasonably dangerous—and that this included large-capacity magazines affecting how weapons operate. Eventually, the trial court ruled in favor of New Jersey, holding that the Second Amendment was not affected if the state argued that it believed certain weapons—in the case of the decision, semiautomatic rifles—and their attachments were too dangerous to be in citizens’ hands.
The Third Circuit, in an en banc decision (although one with a lot of concurrences and dissents about the term “common use”), disagreed.
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First, under the Supreme Court’s test in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the court must ask whether the Second Amendment applies. The Third Circuit concluded that it clearly applies to semiautomatic rifles, as well as to the magazines that are a necessary part of the rifles’ function.
Second, the court examined whether New Jersey could prove that its law was consistent with America’s history of limited firearms regulation. In this context, the important question was whether it was banning weapons, including their accessories, that are in “common use.”
Over the centuries, the Supreme Court has granted some leeway to states in controlling weapons that are indeed “dangerous and unusual.” However, said the Third Circuit, semiautomatic rifles do not fall into that category because millions of Americans own them, as well as magazines that hold more than ten rounds.
Americans routinely use these weapons for self-defense, hunting, target shooting, and pest control. That the weapon has a military history, or that bad people occasionally use it for bad ends, does not change that fact.
For that reason, the Third Circuit held the ban on all semiautomatic rifles (named or unnamed) was unconstitutional. It remanded the case to the trial court so the court could rule on other semiautomatic weapons.
The Third Circuit applied a similar analysis to the state’s large-capacity magazine ban. Currently, there are more than 100 million thirty-round AR-15 magazines in the public’s hands. Pretending that a magazine holding more than 10 rounds is not in common use will not fly.
In sum—and this is a very broad, pro-Second Amendment ruling—New Jersey cannot prohibit ordinary citizens from possessing semiautomatic rifles or magazines holding more than 10 rounds when those items are owned by millions of Americans for lawful purposes. New Jersey signally failed to identify a comparable American historical tradition of banning such commonly possessed arms.
Given that the left’s overriding goal is to consolidate all weapons in the government’s hands, something that is always a prelude to tyranny, it’s hard to overstate what a good thing the Third Circuit’s ruling is.
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