A Washington state judge ruled that the state’s ban on high-capacity magazines violated the U.S. and state constitutions, citing the Supreme Court’s recent Bruen decision.
The judge issued an immediate injunction blocking enforcement, but the state Attorney General appealed and an emergency stay allowed the ban to remain in effect pending appeal.
“The test courts must apply is whether a firearms restriction would have seemed reasonable to the founding generation that drafted and ratified the Second Amendment. If not, the law must give way to the Constitution,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote.
The Bruen decision requires gun controls to withstand scrutiny based on historical precedent, and the judge found the state failed to provide such history to support the magazine ban.
The ruling does not bode well for other modern gun restrictions under the new constitutional analysis established in Bruen.
