Keeping the advantage sounds a lot like keeping the people under their thumb.
A U.S. District Judge in Washington, D.C. has declined to grant an injunction against the city’s ban on “large capacity” magazines, ruling that while magazines in general are “arms” protected by the Second Amendment, LCMs fall outside of the scope of the amendment because they’re a “poor fit” for self-defense purposes.
The challenge to the District’s magazine ban, known as Hanson v. D.C., involves four legal gun owners from D.C. who all say that they would possess and carry “large capacity” magazines in their firearms if they weren’t banned by law. The District’s prohibition comes complete with a potential three-year prison sentence, though it’s unclear how often that sentence is handed down in practice, especially with D.C. prosecutors routinely deciding to decline charges in many illegal gun possession cases.
Even though the D.C. Attorney General’s office is taking a mostly hands-off approach to illegal gun (and magazine) possession, the ban remains on the books and was defended in court by D.C. officials, who maintain that magazines aren’t “arms” at all, but accessories that aren’t protected by the Second Amendment. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, rejected that argument in his opinion, but agreed with the District on its fallback argument that LCM’s are most suitable for military purposes and are not used in self-defense because “because incidents where a civilian actually expends more than ten bullets in self-defense are “vanishingly rare.” From the opinion (citations omitted):
By Cam Edwards
