Federal appeals court strikes down New Jersey's AR-15 and magazine bans in landmark Second Amendment ruling

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated New Jersey's decades-old bans on so-called assault firearms and high-capacity magazines in a 10-5 ruling, the first time a federal appeals court has struck down a state assault weapons ban as unconstitutional.

Judge Arianna Freeman, a Biden appointee writing for the majority, held Friday that the Second Amendment's text "covers all magazines, not just magazines that New Jersey considers 'standard capacity.'" The court found that New Jersey failed to identify historical analogues that could justify its sweeping restrictions on commonly owned rifles and standard-capacity magazines, the legal test the Supreme Court set in its 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, which requires modern gun laws to be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.

New Jersey first enacted the restrictions in 1990. The law banned AR-15-style rifles and similar models classified as "assault firearms," along with any magazine holding more than 10 rounds. For more than three decades, the state defended those restrictions as reasonable public-safety measures. On Friday, the Third Circuit said the Constitution disagreed.

A Biden appointee wrote the opinion that gutted New Jersey's gun laws

The ruling's authorship underscores how far the legal ground has shifted on the Second Amendment since Bruen. Freeman, nominated to the bench by former President Biden, applied the Supreme Court's historical-analogue framework and found New Jersey's case wanting. The state had pointed to colonial-era gunpowder storage laws and 19th-century regulations on Bowie knives, clubs, and pistols in Western territories as justification for its modern ban on semi-automatic rifles.

Freeman was unpersuaded. As The Hill reported, the majority opinion stated plainly:

"But even setting aside the timing of regulations on Bowie knives, slungshots and clubs, pistols, and revolvers, none of those regulations are relevantly similar to the Assault Firearm Provisions."

Judges Emil Bove and Jennifer Mascott, both Trump second-term appointees, agreed with the majority that the restrictions should be struck down entirely. A lower federal court had previously issued a mixed ruling, invalidating the ban on AR-15s specifically but leaving restrictions on other semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines intact. The Third Circuit went further and wiped out the entire regulatory scheme.

The ruling drew a sharp dissent from Judge Patty Shwartz, an Obama appointee, who argued that AR-15s fall outside the Second Amendment's protections altogether. Shwartz wrote:

"In sum, the AR-15's history, features, and uses indicate it is an unusually dangerous tool used by the military and not an arm in common use by civilians for self-defense."

That argument, that an entire class of rifles owned by millions of Americans somehow falls outside the scope of "arms", is precisely the kind of reasoning the Supreme Court's conservative majority rejected in Bruen. Freeman's majority opinion effectively said that if a weapon is commonly owned for lawful purposes, the government cannot ban it without pointing to a genuine historical parallel. New Jersey could not.

No other federal appeals court has gone this far

New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, a Democrat, seized on that point in her response. She called the decision "as unfortunate as it is legally incorrect" and noted that every other federal circuit court to consider the issue had ruled the other way.

Davenport stated:

"Assault weapons and large capacity magazines play a dangerous role in the modern epidemic of mass shootings, and New Jersey acted reasonably and lawfully in restricting them."

But the attorney general's complaint about a circuit split actually strengthens the case for Supreme Court review, and the high court is already moving in that direction. The justices are set to hear challenges to similar bans enacted in Connecticut and the Chicago area during the upcoming term, with a decision expected by next summer. The Third Circuit's ruling now adds a direct conflict among the federal circuits, making it harder for the Supreme Court to sidestep the question.

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler framed the broader implications bluntly. "What this Third Circuit opinion shows is that there are very few gun laws that are safe from being struck down right now," he said. That assessment, from a scholar who has not been a reliable ally of gun rights advocates, captures how dramatically Bruen reshaped the legal landscape. The ruling adds to a string of federal court decisions that have dismantled gun restrictions once considered untouchable.

Gun rights groups call it a turning point

The Firearms Policy Coalition and an NRA state affiliate brought the legal challenges that produced Friday's ruling. Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, called the decision "another devastating blow to the authoritarian war on gun owners."

NRA Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director John Commerford struck a broader note, saying the right to keep and bear arms "is fundamental and cannot be infringed by politicians who prioritize control over constitutional freedoms." In a separate statement, Commerford called the ruling "a historic victory for the NRA, the Second Amendment, and law-abiding Americans."

The decision lands at a moment when the Trump administration has been pressing its own Second Amendment agenda through the courts. The Washington Examiner reported that the Trump Justice Department has filed similar lawsuits against multiple blue states, including a recent suit against Virginia over its assault weapons ban. That federal litigation campaign, combined with private challenges like the one in New Jersey, is squeezing state-level gun restrictions from multiple directions at once.

Courts have also moved against Biden-era regulatory overreach on firearms. A federal court recently vacated a Biden-era ATF rule on private gun sales after the Justice Department dropped its appeal, another sign that the legal architecture supporting aggressive gun regulation is crumbling.

The Third Circuit's ruling does not exist in a vacuum. Federal appeals courts across the country have been grappling with how to apply Bruen's historical framework to modern gun laws, and the results have varied widely. Some circuits have upheld state restrictions; the Third Circuit is now the first to strike one down in its entirety. That split virtually guarantees the Supreme Court will have the final word, and the court's 6-3 conservative majority wrote Bruen in the first place.

The pattern extends beyond gun cases. Federal appeals courts have been actively striking down laws that fail constitutional scrutiny, and the current judicial environment has given challengers reason to press their claims aggressively.

New Jersey's 36-year-old ban now faces an uncertain future

What happens next depends in part on whether Davenport seeks further review. Her statement expressed disagreement with the ruling but did not explicitly announce an appeal. The Third Circuit heard the case en banc, meaning the full court, not a three-judge panel, decided it, which limits the state's options for further review within the circuit. The most likely path forward would be a petition to the Supreme Court, where the justices are already preparing to address the same constitutional question.

For New Jersey gun owners who have lived under these restrictions since 1990, the ruling is a vindication 36 years in the making. For the state officials who defended the ban, it is a rebuke delivered not by a panel of conservative ideologues but by a court whose majority opinion was written by a Biden appointee applying the law the Supreme Court laid down.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to challenge what it views as government overreach on multiple fronts, from Biden-era prosecutions to state-level firearms restrictions. The Third Circuit's ruling fits squarely within that broader effort to restore constitutional limits that blue-state legislatures have spent decades testing.

When a Biden appointee writes the opinion that dismantles your gun ban, the problem is not the court, it is the law.