The effects of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen are already being felt as the U.S. Supreme Court reversed and remanded two rulings from lower courts in California and New Jersey.
The decision in Bruen affirmed that your right to keep and bear arms does not stop at your front door, and used the text-and-history test to help determine New York’s permit law to be unconstitutional. Now, as a result, the Court issued orders to rehear both ANJRPC v. Bruck (in New Jersey) and Duncan v. Bonta (in California) in the lower courts. Both cases, backed by the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), deal with laws that ban magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
“The Third and Ninth Circuits, over dissents, upheld the bans by balancing the state governments’ safety interests with the restriction on the right to keep and bear arms. And both cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. Today, the Court vacated and remanded both cases back to the lower courts to rehear them and to apply the text-and-history test that it adopted in Bruen—not the interest-balancing tests that the courts applied previously. This is a good result that effectively gives us a second and better shot at winning the cases,” reported NRA-ILA.
“California’s ban violates the Second Amendment, the Takings Clause, and the fundamental right of self-defense,” said Jason Ouimet, executive director of NRA-ILA, of the California ban. “The reason Americans choose these commonly owned magazines is the same reason law enforcement does - to better defend themselves, their loved ones, and their communities from violent attack.”
On the issue of “large-capacity” magazines, it is worth noting that President Joe Biden (D) has long called for banning such magazines—completely ignoring the fact that they are commonly owned by millions of Americans.
Biden claimed that banning such magazines as part of the Federal Assault Weapons ban in 1994 “worked,” but the data says otherwise. As we’ve reported previously, “A congressionally mandated study of the federal ‘assault-weapon ban’ of 1994 to 2004 found that the ban had no impact on crime. It concluded: ‘Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best.’ Additionally, research conducted later by the Rand Corporation found no conclusive evidence that banning so-called ‘assault weapons’ or ‘large-capacity’ magazines had any effect on either mass-murder events or violent crime.”
The importance of the Bruen decision is hard to overstate. “New York, and other state and local governments infringing on this right, will have to get out of the way of law-abiding citizens’ freedom to defend themselves,” wrote America’s 1st Freedom Editor in Chief Frank Miniter at the time of the Bruen decision.
Just as the NRA worked to bring Bruen to the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down an unconstitutional carry permit law, it will also continue to work to make sure that other constitutional rights regarding firearms are protected or restored. We’ll keep you up-to-date on how these cases, and any others that follow, play out in the courts moving forward.
