August 7, 2023
BELLEVUE, WA. – The Second Amendment Foundation today filed a motion in U.S. District Court for summary judgment in its challenge of Washington State’s ban on so-called “large-capacity magazines” in a case known as Sullivan v. Ferguson.
SAF is joined in this case by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Rainier Arms, LLC and a private citizen, Gabriella Sullivan. They are represented by attorneys David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson and William V. Bergstrom with Cooper & Kirk PLLC in Washington, D.C., Cody J. Wisniewski at the FPC Foundation, Brian Abbas at Mountain States Legal Foundation, and locally by Joel Ard at Ard Law Group.
“We maintain the magazine ban is unconstitutional,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “As we note in our motion, magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds are in common use across the country. There are millions of such magazines, including huge numbers in Washington, and modern rifles and pistols come from the factory with magazines that hold more than ten cartridges.”
“Designating ten rounds was an arbitrary number,” added SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut, “for which there is no justification. Anti-gun lawmakers and Gov. Jay Inslee seemed to settle on that number as some sort of magic limit. There is no basis in this nation’s history or tradition to restrict firearm magazine capacities to such an illogical number.”
As SAF notes in its motion, the magazine ban is “a complete prohibition on commerce in ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds. The Supreme Court has three times answered the specific question of what historical traditions of firearms regulation can possibly support modern day bans on certain types of ‘arms.’ Those cases establish that states can only ban arms that are ‘dangerous and unusual.’ Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are neither.”
“Courts and legislatures do not have the authority, nor can they be allowed to second-guess choices made by law-abiding citizens by questioning whether they really ‘need’ firearms and the cartridge magazines designed to be used in those firearms,” Gottlieb observed.