Firearms Policy Coalition Challenges D.C.’s Magazine Ban

The battle over protecting arms wages on. The District of Columbia has been and continues to be a ripe battlefield for regaining Second Amendment rights. The District keeps setting up the rest of the progressive strongholds for failure, as they did with the Heller case. Among the many restrictive laws the District has, there’s a ban on magazines with a capacity of over 10 rounds. Firearms Policy Coalition filed a suit on December 17th, 2024 challenging the unconstitutional measure.

“Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced Wednesday that it has filed a new federal lawsuit challenging Washington D.C.’s ban on firearm magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds,” a release stated. “The complaint in Wehr-Darroca v. D.C. can be viewed at firearmspolicy.org/wehr-darroca.”

The 23-page complaint lays out the facts of the case. “The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,’” the introduction to the complaint opens. “Despite this guarantee, Defendants have enacted and enforced a flat prohibition on the sale and/or possession of common, standard capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.”

The complaint further states:

Standard capacity magazines do not give rise to “unprecedented lethality.” The modern variants have been widely available and commonly used for at least 100 years, if not longer. Nor are they “uncommonly dangerous.” More than 700 million of them have been produced and sold over the past 30 years, and at least 40 states have no restrictions at all on magazine capacity. Standard magazines are common in all respects. And they by no means constitute a “dramatic technological change,” because they emerged through incremental technological improvements over the past 500 years, culminating in the essential modern features more than a century ago. More, the illegal use of protected arms to harm others is not an “unprecedented societal concern,” but was known to the Founders and Framers at the time of Ratification, and cannot overcome that these magazines are constitutionally protected and are overwhelmingly used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.

It sounds like standard capacity magazines are in common use, are not dangerous, and are not unusual. The lawsuit does state that “the magazines at issue in this case are not ‘dangerous and unusual,’ but instead are standard components of the sorts of bearable arms in common use for lawful purposes.”

Something that gets overlooked when these challenges pop up is an admission from the State of New Jersey. New Jersey is another state with unconstitutional magazine restrictions. Their law too prohibits the possession of magazines that hold over 10 rounds.

Utilizing a statute for lawfare in the Garden State, a civil complaint against an out-of-state dealer was filed in December of 2019. In the lawsuit, the attorney general at the time stated that “the State of New Jersey (“New. Jersey”) has long banned possession of large capacity ammunition magazines (“LCMs”) — firearm magazines capable of holding more than the standard number of rounds provided by the manufacturer [emphasis added].”

By virtue of New Jersey’s admission, there are plenty of magazines over ten rounds that would be legal, however they are not. The citizens of D.C. are also being kept from actually being allowed to possess magazines that are provided by the manufacturers of many commercially available and common arms.

This admission in a different case in a different jurisdiction might not be meaningful. However, it embraces the spirit of the hypocrisy of the progressive gun-grabbing Communists. Naturally, it’s worth repeating.

“Washington D.C. is not exempt from the Constitution,” said FPC President Brandon Combs in a statement. He further noted that “FPC continues its work to end these immoral firearm magazine bans and other unconstitutional policies throughout the country.”

Will the District take a knee on this one? Hard to tell 100%, but it’s not likely. Thankfully we have advocates like the FPC out there putting anti-freedom jurisdictions to task. We’ll be watching this case as it continues to move through the courts.