Sometimes freedom rears its lovely head in unexpected places.
A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has ruled the District’s restrictive law limiting the capacity of firearms magazines is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The law outlawed any magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, which takes in the vast majority of magazines that come standard with many of the nation’s most popular firearms.
Writing for the majority in Benson v. U.S., Judge Joshua Deahl likely startled many gun-ban advocates by getting right to the heart of the matter.
On the District’s logic, states could ban two-round or even one-round magazines—there’s no reason a semiautomatic firearm cannot fire with an empty or ‘dummy’ magazine so long as there is a round in the chamber,” Judge Deahl wrote in the ruling. “And bans like that would permit states to effectively eliminate any semi-automatic firing capacity and require manual reloading after each shot. In fact, under the District’s view, the state could just directly outlaw the semi-automatic firing mechanism because, by itself, that is a harmless component of a firearm and it is not a necessary feature of any gun.”
As Deahl pointed out, doing so, however, would run contrary to the central command in the Heller case that states cannot ban the most popular weapons chosen by law-abiding Americans for lawful purposes.
“For that matter, modern cartridges are not necessary for firing a gun either,” Deahl continued. “If the Second Amendment applied only to those things that are strictly necessary for a gun’s operation, states could ban cartridges so long as primitive musket balls remained a legal alternative ammunition.”
Deahl concluded: “Because 11+ magazines are in common and ubiquitous use for lawful purposes, the District’s outright ban on them violates the Second Amendment.”
The ruling, which obviously could be appealed, quickly drew praise from pro-gun rights organizations, including the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA).
“This is a major Second Amendment ruling,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said in a news release praising the ruling. “You could say that it is the ‘second Shot Heard Around the World.’”
In his opinion, Deahl explained that even the federal government now “concedes that this ban violates the Second Amendment. That reversal, Gottlieb explained, is indeed significant.
“Whether anti-gun lawmakers and liberal judges realize it or not,” Gottlieb said, “Judge Deahl’s opinion means the Second Amendment has teeth. The gun prohibition lobby just got smacked, because this ruling puts one of their major arguments in the corner, where it belongs.”
Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), also responded quite positively to the ruling.
“I’d be remiss not to thank @AAGDhillon, @AGPamBondi and the rest of the team at US DOJ for deciding to no longer defend the D.C. magazine ban,” Moros posted to X. “I think that played a huge role in getting a skeptical court to finally issue the correct ruling.”
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