The Second Circuit just decided a case regarding gun control legislation in Connecticut and New York. It’s important in its own right, and because it concerns two issues that the Supreme Court could soon take up: bans on assault weapons and on high-capacity magazines. Background. Both states had assault weapon bans in place before the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Those bans were modeled on the federal assault weapon ban that was enacted in 1994 and allowed to expire in 2004. (I’ll note here that some people object to the use of the terms “assault weapons” and “assault rifles,” viewing them as politicized terms that focus mainly on the appearance of certain weapons rather than their function. I’m going to use the terms anyhow since the legislatures and the court did so.) Laws after Sandy Hook. In 2012, Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook before shooting himself. He used an assault rifle and carried 30-round magazines. In response to the incident, New York passed new laws, defining assault weapons more broadly to include any semiautomatic rifle with at least one of a list of military-style features such as pistol grips or telescoping stocks (previously, only guns with two such features qualified); prohibiting magazines with a capacity larger than ten rounds; and prohibiting, under most circumstances, gun users from loading more than seven rounds into a magazine. (Initially, legislators had wanted to ban magazines larger than seven rounds, but because magazines with [...]
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