On its face, New Jersey District Judge Peter Sheridan (appointed to the bench by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and made the “senior judge” five years ago at age 68) got it right: New Jersey’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles is unconstitutional.
But he didn't like to do that.
It is difficult to accept the Supreme Court’s decision (in Brune, 2022) that a particular firearms policy choice is “out of choice” in a situation where radicalized individuals frequently own and use those same firearms with malicious intent.
And yet the Supreme Court's decision today was determined by one of the most fundamental principles of law in our legal system: precedential binding: when the Supreme Court makes the law of our land, I, as a lower court, am obligated to follow it.
This principle, coupled with our government leaders’ reckless inaction in addressing the tragedy of mass shootings afflicting our nation, calls for a court ruling.
For these reasons, the AR-15 assault weapon provision is unconstitutional.
What Judge Sheridan did with this highly limited, logically and judicially unsound decision was to set the stage for a credible appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which will then have the opportunity to correct Judge Sheridan's thinking and conclusions and relieve New Jersey gun owners from continuing burdens and violations of their rights.
First, the Sheridan ruling holds that New Jersey’s ban only applies to AR-15 rifles and not to all other rifles banned by the state, including:
• Shotguns with a rotating cylinder, such as the “Street Sweeper” or “Stryker 12”.
• Beretta AR-70 and BM59 semi-automatic rifles
• Bushmaster assault rifle
• Galil type
• Heckler & Koch HK.91, HK.93, HK.94, MPS, PSG-1
• Ruger K-Mini-14/5F and Mini-14/SRF
• Springfield Arsenal BM59 and SAR-48 types
• USAS 12 semi-automatic shotgun
• Uzi-type semi-automatic firearms.
Sheridan avoided ruling the entire law unconstitutional because “plaintiffs sometimes broadly formulate their claims and seek a blanket declaration that (New Jersey's) assault weapons law is unconstitutional; at other times, plaintiffs narrow their claims and focus solely on the AR-15.”
In other words, if you don't ask, you don't get.
But in keeping the state's LCM ban in place, Sheridan likened the state's LCM ban to the historic ban on Bowie knives.
The LCM amendment is constitutional because, although it implicates Second Amendment rights, the restrictions are consistent with historical restrictions in our nation’s traditions.
More precisely, capacity reductions are restrictions on firearm ownership that do not blanket prohibit law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights to weapons commonly used for self-defense.
Get it? The LCM portion of New Jersey's semi-automatic rifle ban isn't actually a ban, it's simply a “restriction on firearm ownership.”
Lacking any historical evidence (as Bruen requested) of a ban on LCM (LCM did not exist when the Second Amendment was added), Sheridan, with the cooperation of the state of New Jersey, dug deep into the wellsprings of the imagination.
The Court then moves to analyze the legitimacy of New Jersey’s restrictions by considering New Jersey’s reasons for restricting high-capacity ammunition magazines and how they are consistent with our nation’s historical traditions of firearms regulation….
Apt historical analogs here are other firearms (specifically pistols) and the Bowie knife….
The closest comparison to the regulation at issue here is the Bowie knife, which, like many other knives, has (historically) often been regulated like a handgun…
Thus, although a few exceptional states implemented near-total restrictions on bowie knives, these restrictions, as a whole, formed the basis of a tradition of banning some weapons that, although useful and common for self-defense, could nevertheless pose a threat to public safety.
In the Supreme Court's decision in Bruen there was no argument that “public safety” was part of the reasoning behind the decision, because there was no such argument.
To justify his ruling on LCMs as opposed to rulings on loaded rifles, Sheridan deployed the standard gun control position: weapons cause gun violence, not perpetrators.
There is significant data showing that the use of high-capacity magazines increases the lethality of mass shootings.
High-capacity magazines, capable of holding 10 or more rounds, are used in a disproportionate number of deadly mass shootings; in fact, they were used in every mass shooting from 2019 to 2022.
This observation reflects a growing trend. First, mass shootings are becoming more deadly. Second, high-capacity magazines have been used in most recent mass shootings. This relationship cannot be ignored.
New Jersey’s stated objective of effectively delaying mass shooters is well accomplished by the LCM amendment.
The LCM amendments have the potential to achieve this objective by providing a solution to this very real problem: the lethality rate per victim of a shooter equipped with a magazine capable of continuous uninterrupted fire for extended periods of time decreases as the number of magazines available for uninterrupted fire decreases.
Magazine capacity limits the speed at which a victim can be injured. Magazine capacity limits allow time to stop, disrupt or deter a shooter.
These issues, while new to us, are similar to other security challenges posed by weapons commonly used for lawful purposes that our nation has faced in the past.
In the past, lawmakers have taken limited steps to prevent these social problems, as New Jersey has done here.
This burden on the right of self-defense of the people of New Jersey is comparable to the burden imposed by these historic laws. These historical parallels therefore provide a basis for the conclusion that states may regulate the allowable capacity of high-capacity magazines.
Of course, this is exactly how the Second Amendment was abolished and relegated to “second-class” status, by logical reasoning rather than by following historical parallels. The Bruen decision corrected this kind of “logical reasoning” made by Sheridan.
All of this provides compelling grounds for an appeal of his sentence to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, the state's ban makes it criminally liable for New Jersey residents to possess any semi-automatic rifle other than an AR-15, or an LCM capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
