What is a “high-capacity magazine?” Circa 2025, it’s a firearm magazine anti-liberty/gun cracktivists think they can get away with banning. At the moment, they’re limiting capacity to ten rounds and the usual blue state suspects are trying to ban evil “high-capacity magazines.”
The standard magazines of many guns exceed ten rounds. The Glock 19 holds 15, the Glock 17 seventeen, and the AR-15 family, 30. There is no public safety benefit in limiting magazine capacity because even a novice can change magazines within seconds.
As one might expect, California enacted a ban on magazines of over ten rounds, and the Ninth Circuit—California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, upheld it, rewriting history in the process. In so doing, the 9th Circuit, the most reversed in America, overturned the decision of the trial court, which held the ban unconstitutional. Bans of this kind are possible because the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions, most recently in Bruen (2022), did not specify magazine capacity or many other elements of firearm nomenclature, function or law relating to carrying guns.
The court badly misread Bruen and warped history:
The appellate court provided two independent reasons for its conclusion. First, it determined that “the text of the Second Amendment does not encompass the right to possess large-capacity magazines because they are neither ‘arms’ nor protected accessories.”
“Large-capacity magazines are optional accessories to firearms, and firearms operate as intended without a large-capacity magazine,” the court explained. “Possession of a large-capacity magazine therefore falls outside the text of the Second Amendment.”
Second, the court reasoned that even if the Second Amendment did cover such accessories, “California’s ban falls within the Nation’s tradition of protecting innocent persons by prohibiting especially dangerous uses of weapons and by regulating components necessary to the firing of a firearm.”
The magazines in question aren’t optional accessories. While it’s possible to feed most semiautos with a ten or fewer round magazine, for guns like the Glock 17 and 19, it is those smaller magazines that are specially made, non-standard, accessories. Even the original, 1970s, magazines for the AR-15 and its military, M-16 variant were 20 rounds. Thirty round magazines have been standard for decades.
The court’s second piece of reasoning is even more specious. It could reasonably allow the banning of such things as barrels, firing pins, even frames “necessary to the firing of a firearm.” Their decision also reveals an all too common, lack of understanding of not only the Second Amendment and history, but of guns.
Of the 11-member en banc panel, four dissented:
“California’s magazine ban is presumptively unconstitutional because the plain text of the Second Amendment protects the possession of magazines capable of feeding more than 10 rounds,” Bumatay said. “Nothing in the text, or the country’s historical understanding of the Second Amendment, warrants California’s magazine ban.”
Among the dissenters is Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who produced an 18-minute video, demonstrating conclusively why the majority is badly wrong:
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Graphic: X Screenshot
VanDyke’s dissent included a controversial video showing him handling handguns and explaining their mechanics, which U.S. Senior Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon criticized in her concurring opinion. The Bill Clinton appointee argued that VanDyke had “in essence appointed himself as an expert witness in this case, providing a factual presentation with the express aim of convincing the readers of his view of the facts without complying with any of the procedural safeguards that usually apply to experts and their testimony.”
But in a deft move, Judge VanDyke, in the written portion of his dissent, explained why the video was entirely proper:
Finally, I must respond to Judge Berzon’s concurrence attacking at some length the video portion of this dissent as “wildly improper.”
Take the article link to read the rest, but VanDyke neatly eviscerated Berzon’s complaint:
We have long included links to videos in our court’s opinions, as well as pictures, timelines, and diagrams. Nobody thought that was a problem until now, and Judge Berzon even defends that practice in her concurrence. In short, Judge Berzon’s overreading of General Order 4.5(a) is just that—an overreading.
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Graphic: NRA Screenshot
Judge Berzon’s complaint is likely not over arcane court practice but over the truth and effectiveness of Judge VanDyke’s video. For the time being, the 9th Circuit’s decision applies only to those states and territories over which it has jurisdiction, and states like Montana and Idaho are unlikely to enact similar bans. Because there is uncertainty over this issue in the lower courts, and because the Supreme Court is more than aware that just about anything relating to the 9th Circuit needs to be overturned, it’s likely the Supreme Court will grant cert and equally likely they’ll overturn this egregious and purposeful misreading of Bruen and American history relating to guns.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
