Less than a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down New Jersey’s controversial bans on so-called “assault weapons” and standard-capacity magazines, the quagmire that is state-level gun control got even murkier.
On Tuesday, the appeals court’s colleagues in the First Circuit upheld a similar law in Recchia v. Campbell.
Massachusetts may still prohibit ‘assault weapons’-for now
Second Amendment advocates received yet another shining example of why the recent U.S. Supreme Court acceptance of a pair of challenges to these prohibitions on the last day of June was a welcome surprise.
Massachusetts officials already won a motion to dismiss in U.S. District Court, and the First Circuit agreed to reject the lawsuit against the state’s gun control regime.
Of course, the Third Circuit sent shock waves through the anti-Second Amendment cabal just days ago when it ruled New Jersey’s bans unconstitutional. This issue is now teed up for SCOTUS to hear arguments with far-reaching implications this fall.
Anti-gun radicals took a victory lap, but it may be short-lived
Judge Seth Aframe wrote the opinion allowing the Bay State to continue to prohibit the most popular long guns in the U.S.
“In sum, Recchia has presented a narrow claim for declaring the Massachusetts law facially invalid that cannot succeed given Capen,” Aframe explained. “Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s rejection of Recchia’s facial challenge as a faithful application of circuit precedent.”
The judge referred to a previous First Circuit ruling supporting the state’s “assault weapons” ban.
With federal courts clearly divided on the critical constitutional rights issue, the Supreme Court’s role as final arbiter is crystallized. How the bench will settle this issue is far from certain, but justices could bring the curtain down on such state and local prohibitions.
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