With a majority of Rhode Island state senators and representatives signed on as co-sponsors of a sweeping bill that would outlaw the sale of most semi-automatic rifles and shotguns (and prohibit current owners from keeping their guns unless they register them with the state), the odds of the Democrats’ latest iteration of an “assault weapons” ban are, unfortunately, pretty good.
The best chance to derail the bill, at least at the moment, appears to be the Senate Judiciary Committee, where support for the anti-2A bill is, according to statehouse reporters, evenly split. On Wednesday, the committee heard several hours of testimony from proponents and opponents of the gun ban legislation, but took no immediate action to bring the bill up for a vote.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held [Sen. Louis] DiPalma’s bill and more than a dozen other gun bills for further study as they heard testimony on those proposals.
DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat, urged the panel to bring his bill the floor for a vote, and he attempted to head off claims that the legislation is unconstitutional. He cited recent federal court cases and said experts would talk to the committee about the constitutional issues.
“Banning assault-style weapons is categorically constitutional,” he said. “Some may not want to believe that, but at the end of the day, as an engineer, the facts, data, and context are clear.”
And as a politician, DiPalma is talking out of his rear end. It’s true that, to date, every appellate court that has considered the constitutionality of various “assault weapon” bans have upheld the laws, but that has far more to do with the makeup of those courts than the arguments they deployed in favor of the bans. Some courts have ruled that commonly-owned semi-automatic rifles aren’t protected by the Second Amendment because they’re “unusually dangerous”, which is a complete misreading of the Supreme Court’s guidance that only those arms that are both “dangerous and unusual” fall beyond the scope of the Second Amendment.
Other courts have concluded that AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles are “like” machine guns, and can therefore be banned, since the Heller decision included a line about “M16s and the like” not necessarily being protected by the Second Amendment. The problem with that, of course, is that while a select-fire rifle used by the military and a semi-automatic rifle available to civilians may look similar they’re functionally very different.
And while appellate courts have upheld these bans, a number of district court judges have held that these laws do violate our right to keep and bear arms. Ultimately it’s a question that the Supreme Court is going to have to answer, and based on how long SCOTUS has held on to the Snope case challenging Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban, it looks like there’s a good chance the justices will do exactly that in the relatively near future; perhaps as early as next term.
Tim Lachance, the assistant general counsel for the National Sports Shooting Association, told the committee that the weapons, which he called “modern sporting rifles,” are among the most popular firearms on the market.
He argued that banning the entire category would not hold up to legal scrutiny, and argued Rhode Island should wait until the US Supreme Court weighs in on similar bans in other states.
“We are simply in a position of urging you to wait,” Lachance said. “It will only serve to unfairly and unlawfully restrict the constitutional rights of Rhode Islanders, and will likely just result in costly litigation for the state, because these laws will be challenged.”
Rhode Island’s ban on “large capacity” magazines is already being challenged in court, and the Supreme Court has been weighing a request for a preliminary injunction since last December. The justices could have denied that request at any point over the past four months, but like the Snope case, they’ve repeatedly re-listed Ocean State Tactical v. Neronha for consideration in conference, which again suggests that the justices aren’t ready to give the green light to the state’s prohibition on magazines that can accept more than ten rounds.
Of course, the last thing anti-gunners like DiPalma want is for lawmakers to take a “wait-and-see” approach to his proposed semi-auto ban. With similar bills defeated or left to die in committee in Hawaii and New Mexico, and Colorado Democrats watering down their own ban to allow for continued sale and possession of these firearms so long as gun owners undergo additional training and obtain a permission slip from their local sheriff, DiPalma’s bill is the gun control lobby’s best chance of putting their latest iteration of an “assault weapons” ban into law before the Supreme Court weighs in, and they’re heavily invested in getting the bill out of committee and onto the Senate floor.
Second Amendment advocates in Rhode Island have done outstanding work in rallying opposition to the gun ban bills in the House and Senate, and they once again turned out in force to testify against DiPalma’s legislation on Wednesday. They don’t have to persuade every member of the Judiciary Committee to reject the measure; if the committee remains evenly divided on the legislation that would be enough to doom it to defeat.
Rhode Island’s legislature is scheduled to adjourn on June 30th, so we’re not out of the woods yet, but every day that the “Assault Weapons Ban of 2025” remains bottled up in committee is a small victory for Second Amendment supporters, and with constant pressure on lawmakers Rhode Island gun owners may very well be able to keep this awful bill from becoming a truly terrible law.
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