PHILADELPHIA – For residents of New Jersey who have lived for decades under one of the country’s most restrictive gun laws, Thursday’s ruling landed without warning. The full 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 10-5 to strike down the state’s ban on AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles and its ten-round magazine limit, holding that both restrictions violate the Second Amendment. The decision arrives just weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Hawaii’s gun-permission law in a 6-3 Second Amendment ruling, and it drops New Jersey into a legal dispute that could reach Washington within months.
Writing for the majority in Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs v. Attorney General, U.S. Circuit Judge Arianna Freeman applied the standard the Supreme Court established in District of Columbia v. Heller and expanded in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Under that framework, firearms restrictions must align with the nation’s historical tradition of gun regulation from the founding era. State bans like New Jersey’s, Judge Freeman wrote for the majority, “teach that bans or broad prohibitions on possessing or carrying of a class of weapons in common use for lawful purposes fail to find support in our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation.” New Jersey, the court concluded, failed that test on both the semiautomatic rifle ban and the magazine capacity limit.
New Jersey’s Assault Firearms Law has been on the books since 1990, four years before Congress enacted a federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and was never renewed. The en banc ruling extends beyond AR-15s to cover every semiautomatic rifle classified as an “assault firearm” under state law, going further than a 2024 district court ruling by U.S. District Judge Peter Sheridan that had applied constitutional protection only to Colt-manufactured AR-15s. The Third Circuit additionally directed the lower court to assess whether the ban should be struck down as applied to semiautomatic pistols and shotguns as well.
The National Rifle Association, which has been litigating the case since 2018, called the ruling a “historic victory for the NRA, the Second Amendment, and law-abiding Americans.” Justin Davis, the NRA’s managing director, said the length of the fight only added to the significance of the outcome. “This is an NRA case that we’ve been litigating since 2018, so it’s a monumental win,” Davis said, as Fox News reported.
The organization framed the decision as a reaffirmation of constitutional protections that gun-restriction laws have treated as negotiable. “The right to keep and bear arms, including commonly-owned rifles and standard-capacity magazines, is fundamental and cannot be infringed,” the NRA said in a statement following the ruling. The phrase “commonly-owned” is legally significant: the Bruen test requires courts to assess whether restricted weapons are in widespread civilian use, a standard the NRA has used to challenge restrictions on the most popular rifle platform in the country, which manufacturers sold in the tens of millions after the federal assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004.
New Jersey officials responded with alarm. “Weapons of war do not belong on the streets of New Jersey,” Governor Mikie Sherrill said. “Our commonsense gun safety laws have saved lives and protected communities, and shootings have declined for the last three years. We will not back down from extreme attempts to weaken New Jersey’s laws.” Attorney General Jennifer Davenport was equally pointed: “This decision is as unfortunate as it is legally incorrect,” she said. “Assault weapons and large capacity magazines play a dangerous role in the modern epidemic of mass shootings, and every other federal circuit court to consider the issue has come out the other way.”
Five judges dissented from the 10-5 ruling, arguing that semiautomatic rifles with detachable high-capacity magazines occupy a category of “unusually dangerous military-style weapons” that states retain constitutional authority to regulate. The dissenters also noted that the ruling conflicts directly with decisions from other federal appeals courts, including courts in Illinois and Maryland that have upheld similar restrictions. That conflict between circuits is legally significant: it creates a circuit split making Supreme Court review substantially more likely than it would be if all federal appeals courts agreed.
The circuit split has been building since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision sent courts across the country to apply a text, history, and tradition test to existing gun laws. Courts in the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits have upheld assault weapons bans in Maryland, Illinois, and California, reaching conclusions at odds with Thursday’s ruling. The Third Circuit has now joined a competing line of decisions. The Supreme Court agreed in June to hear a challenge to Connecticut’s assault weapons ban, a case that grew out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, making a national resolution of the conflict increasingly imminent.
For New Jersey, the practical consequences are immediate and unresolved. The state enacted its firearms law in a period when federal courts interpreted the Second Amendment as protecting primarily the right of states to maintain militias rather than individual gun ownership. The Heller decision in 2008 changed that reading fundamentally, and Bruen in 2022 added the historical tradition test that has since been used to dismantle restrictions lower courts had considered settled. New Jersey officials have not yet indicated whether they will seek a stay of Thursday’s ruling while any appeal proceeds, though states in similar positions have typically moved quickly to prevent new sales of previously banned weapons before a higher court can intervene.
The ruling arrives in the middle of a broader political debate over gun policy that has produced almost no federal legislative movement in recent years. Several mass shootings carried out with AR-15-style rifles in the United States over the past two decades have renewed pressure on Congress to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban or enact new restrictions, but those efforts have stalled repeatedly. State-level laws have been the primary arena for that fight, and courts, rather than legislatures, have become the main forum where their future is now being decided.
Constitutional scholars who track Second Amendment litigation expect the ruling’s impact to ripple well beyond New Jersey. Eight other states, including California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, have enacted restrictions on semiautomatic rifles or high-capacity magazines that the Third Circuit’s reasoning, if adopted by the Supreme Court, could invalidate. The case is among the most significant Second Amendment disputes to emerge from a federal appellate court since Bruen, and its final resolution, whether in the Third Circuit itself or in Washington, will shape the legal landscape for gun restrictions for a generation.
