New Jersey’s gun control machine is clearly worried. After a major court ruling in Benson v. United States struck down Washington, D.C.’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds, Garden State officials rushed to the Third Circuit with a last-minute letter trying to keep that decision from gaining traction. The filing is short, but it says a lot. New Jersey knows the legal ground under its AR-15 and magazine bans is getting weaker, and Mark Smith of The Four Boxes Diner was right to flag it.
New Jersey is trying to stop the Third Circuit from giving any weight to the D.C. Court of Appeals’ March 5 decision in Benson v. United States, a ruling that struck down the District’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds. In that opinion, the D.C. court said those magazines are “ubiquitous,” number in the “hundreds of millions,” and are “arms in common and ubiquitous use by law-abiding citizens across this country.” The court ultimately held that D.C.’s outright ban violates the Second Amendment and reversed Tyree Benson’s conviction.
That ruling is a serious problem for states like New Jersey, which are still trying to defend bans on some of the most commonly owned rifles and magazines in America. New Jersey’s own March 18 letter to the Third Circuit makes clear the state knows its position on unconstitutional bans on commonly used firearms and accessories are failing across the country.
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Right out of the gate, New Jersey urged the court to ignore Benson, writing: “This Court should reject the non-binding outlier ruling in Benson v. United States.” The state then complained that the D.C. decision “remains subject to en banc review” and “conflicts with every federal circuit to consider assault weapons and LCM laws.”
New Jersey points to Hanson v. District of Columbia as a conflicting authority, but the two cases are not in the same procedural posture. Hanson was a preliminary injunction appeal, which means the D.C. Circuit was reviewing an early-stage request to block the law before the case had been fully litigated. The question in Hanson was not whether the magazine ban had definitively been proven constitutional on a full merits record, but whether the challengers had carried the heavy burden required to win the “extraordinary remedy” of preliminary relief at the outset of the case.
Benson, by contrast, was a final merits decision from the D.C. Court of Appeals. That court did not merely say the challengers had failed to clear an early procedural hurdle. It squarely held that the District’s magazine ban violated the Second Amendment, described magazines holding more than 10 rounds as “arms in common and ubiquitous use by law-abiding citizens across this country,” and reversed Tyree Benson’s conviction. So while New Jersey wants the Third Circuit to treat Hanson and Benson as if they carry the same weight, Benson is the more direct and more developed ruling on the underlying constitutional question.
That is the heart of New Jersey’s strategy. The state is trying to isolate Benson before the Third Circuit issues rulings in the consolidated New Jersey ban cases. Anti-gun officials clearly do not want judges in the 3rd Circuit taking a hard look at a fresh decision holding that magazines over 10 rounds are protected arms in common lawful use.
The filing gets even more revealing when New Jersey attacks the basic idea that commonly owned firearms and magazines receive strong constitutional protection. The state argues that the Benson majority’s view that “commonly purchased weapons are per se protected runs into five problems.” It goes on to claim that the approach “is ahistorical,” points to the same old Bowie knife and slungshot restrictions they always bring up, and warns that a popularity-based test could create what it calls “startling” results.
That is an admission of what gun owners have been saying for years: once courts honestly apply the “common use” standard, bans on AR-15s and standard-capacity magazines become much harder to defend.
And New Jersey knows it.
The state’s letter says a “proper historical analysis confirms that States can regulate unusually dangerous weapons unsuitable for and disproportionate to the objective of individual self-defense; their authority does not turn on market popularity.” But that framing only works if the rifles and magazines in question are actually unusual. They are not.
That is where Benson becomes so damaging to the anti-gun cause. The D.C. Court of Appeals did not describe these magazines as rare or fringe. It described them as “ubiquitous in our country,” making up “about half of the magazines in the hands of our citizenry,” and coming standard “with the most popular firearms sold in America today.”
That is devastating language for any state trying to argue that millions of peaceable Americans can be disarmed from owning standard rifle magazines because politicians have decided they are too dangerous.
This is also why the fight matters far beyond New Jersey. If a court recognizes that magazines over 10 rounds are plainly in common lawful use, then the same reasoning puts enormous pressure on bans targeting AR-15s and other common semi-automatic rifles. Gun-control advocates have spent years pretending these arms sit outside the Second Amendment’s protection. The more courts examine the real numbers and the real history, the weaker that claim looks.
New Jersey’s filing also shows something else: anti-gun states are still trying to repackage old talking points in post-Bruen language. They now speak in terms of “history” and “tradition,” but the goal is the same as ever — to carve the most popular modern firearms and accessories out of the Constitution. The problem for them is that Heller and Bruen did not create a Second Amendment limited to whatever guns blue-state politicians find acceptable. And Benson is the latest ruling to remind them of that fact.
There is still more litigation ahead, and nothing is final yet in the Third Circuit. But this much is obvious: New Jersey’s Attorney General did not file this letter because it feels confident. It filed this letter because it sees the danger. When a court starts saying out loud that standard-capacity magazines are protected arms in common lawful use, the legal foundation under magazine bans and so-called “assault weapon” bans starts to crack.
Mark Smith was right to flag this filing. It is short, but it says a lot. New Jersey is trying to stop a pro-Second Amendment ruling from gaining momentum before the Third Circuit speaks. That alone tells you the state understands what may be coming next.
If the courts follow the Constitution instead of the usual anti-gun script, New Jersey’s bans may be heading where they belong: the trash bin of history.
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