A D.C. Circuit panel on Tuesday rejected a challenge to Washington’s 10-round magazine cap, the latest in a 16-year-long effort to strike down the capital city’s strict gun laws. The three-judge panel majority upheld a lower court ruling against four firearm owners outside Washington whose guns are capable of holding more than 10 bullets. They say they need more ammunition for self-defense; specifically, magazines that contain up to 17 bullets, Courthouse News reports. Finding that argument unlikely to succeed at trial, U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett and Senior Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg, appointees of Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, respectively, said the gun owners' request for a preliminary injunction against the ammunition cap was unwarranted. U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Donald Trump appointee, dissented. Washington’s rationale for the magazine cap, to “mitigate the carnage of mass shootings,” paralleled Prohibition-era laws “restricting possession of high-capacity weapons” and was only a modest burden on Second Amendment rights, the panel majority said in an unsigned opinion.
The circuit judges applied a two-part test established in N.Y. State Rifle & Piston Association v. Bruen, which required them to decide whether the Second Amendment plainly covered possession of an extra-large capacity magazine — and if it does, whether the magazine cap is consistent with “this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” On the first question, the panel found the challengers would likely succeed in arguing the high-capacity magazines were “arms” under the Second Amendment. But it found that certain Prohibition-era restrictions meant to limit the use of the Thompson submachine gun, in conjunction with contemporaneous laws meant to limit the use of Bowie knives and sawed-off shotguns, together “fit nicely” into two traditions regulating magazines and weapons capable of “unprecedented lethality.”
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