Washington Supreme Court restores state’s high-capacity gun magazine ban
Monique Merrill
OLYMPIA, Wash. (CN) — Washington state successfully defended its ban on the sale and purchase of large-capacity gun magazines after the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the law doesn’t violate the right to bear arms.
Critical to the Supreme Court’s decision was the finding that large-capacity magazines — those that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition — are not “arms” within either the state or United States constitutional provision.
“[Large-capacity magazines] are not weapons — they are attachments to weapons, or accessories,” Associate Chief Justice Charles Johnson wrote on behalf of the majority.
Washington legislators enacted Senate Bill 5078 in 2022, prohibiting the manufacture, import, distribution or sale of any large-capacity magazine within the state. The magazines are defined as any “ammunition feeding device” capable of accepting more than 10 rounds.
In late 2023, then-Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued Gator’s Custom Guns, a gun shop in the southwest city of Kelso, and its owner, Walter Wentz, for continuing to sell high-capacity magazines.
The Cowlitz County Superior Court sided with the gun shop in April 2024 and declared the bill facially unconstitutional, though the Washington Supreme Court issued an emergency stay barring the superior court’s ruling from taking place until the high court reviewed the case.
While the gun store argued that large-capacity magazines are subject to Second Amendment protections because they are a “critical functional component” of a firearm, and the lower court agreed, the Supreme Court wasn’t convinced.
“[Senate Bill 5078] regulates only [large-capacity magazines] — magazines that are capable of accepting more than 10 rounds of ammunition — and Gator’s admits that no firearm requires a magazine of this particular capacity to function,” Johnson wrote. “Thus, [large-capacity magazines] are not required for a firearm to function.”
The Supreme Court reasoned that three factors contribute to the finding that large-capacity magazines are not protected: they are not designed as weapons, they are not traditionally or commonly used for self-defense and purchasing them is not among additional rights essential to enjoying the core right to bear arms in self-defense.
The trial court’s logic in determining that magazines are arms, and therefore large-capacity magazines are also arms, was “problematic,” the high court found.
“First, we have never held that magazines are arms, and the fact that a semiautomatic weapon will not function as intended without one does not conclusively establish that they are,” Johnson wrote.
Additionally, just because one instrument in a category may be afforded constitutional protections doesn’t require all instruments in that category to enjoy the same protections, Johnson found.
“Logically, the fact that the government could not ban an entire class of firearm components without impairing the right to bear arms does not mean that the government is not permitted to restrict a specific subclass of that component,” Johnson wrote.
Even if the court determined that large-capacity magazines fit the constitutional definition of “arms,” the components would still fall outside the protection of the right to bear arms because the provisions protect only weapons that are commonly used for self-defense.
“We have been presented with no credible and persuasive evidence or argument that [large-capacity magazines] are commonly used for such a purpose,” Johnson wrote.
The gun store presented the court with ownership statistics to show that the magazines are commonly used, but the high court noted that the data didn’t support the argument that they are “commonly used for self-defense.”
“It is clear that [large-capacity magazines] are attached to firearms in order to increase their ammunition capacity above 10 rounds, and there is undoubtedly a combat purpose behind the use of firearms,” Johnson wrote.
Plus, the ban still permits individuals to own, operate and maintain proficiency with firearms, as there are no firearms that expressly require a large-capacity magazine to function. Unlike ammunition, which is necessary for a firearm to operate or else be rendered a paperweight or “scarcely effective bludgeoning tool,” a semiautomatic weapon can still function with a magazine that falls outside of the law’s restriction.
While the Supreme Court found in favor of the state on the constitutional challenge, it declined the state’s request to reassign the case to a new judge on remand. The Cowlitz County judge’s legal errors in finding the bill unconstitutional weren’t enough to warrant the reassignment, even though the record reflects the judge’s “strong feelings as to the constitutionality” of the law.
Dissenting from the majority, Supreme Court Justice Gordon McCloud argued that the Second Amendment protects more than just “inanimate objects like firearms or magazines in isolation,” but rather the conduct of bearing arms for self-defense and other legal uses.
McCloud noted that it was “hard to imagine a semiautomatic firearm fulfilling its key purposes, including the purpose of self-defense, without a magazine.”
“In a contest between a state statute and the United States Constitution, the judicial branch has the duty to uphold the Constitution,” McCloud wrote. “This is true even when the portion of the Constitution at issue is the Second Amendment.”