Last week a three-judge panel on the D.C. Court of Appeals (which is the highest local court in the District) ruled the District of Columbia’s ban on ammunition magazines that can hold more than ten rounds violates the Second Amendment. These magazines are “arms”, the court concluded, and they are unquestionably in common use for lawful purposes, which means that they’re protected by the U.S. Constitution.
Now the District of Columbia is hoping to reverse that decision through an en banc review, and is asking the Court of Appeals to keep the ruling from taking affect while it appeals.
DC has asked the DC Court of Appeals to “suspend the precedential status” of the opinion striking down the district’s magazine ban, saying the decision “has created uncertainty and chaos” and it plans to file an en banc petition. https://t.co/wThEwK3gmy pic.twitter.com/QUrRO1Hj02
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) March 9, 2026
In its request, the District claims that the panel’s decision “has created uncertainty and chaos” and that the “blast radius of the decision is potentially massive”, arguing that the opinion also impacts “exceedingly common charges governing unlicensed and unregistered firearms.”
I think D.C.’s licensing and registration requirements are equally unsound from a constitutional perspective, but there’s nothing in the panel’s decision that impacts those statutes. The opinion released by the court deals exclusively with the District’s prohibition on commonly owned magazines, and the only uncertainty resulting from the decision is whether or not the ban is still actively being enforced.
The U.S. Attorney’s office has already declined to pursue charges against any legal gun owner caught with a “large capacity” magazine, though the D.C. Attorney General’s office has continued prosecuting possession cases.
The D.C. Court of Appeals hasn’t granted the District’s request, but the opinion will likely remain on hold while the en banc review is being considered. The court has set an expedited briefing schedule that will conclude next Wednesday, and a decision on granting or denying the en banc request could come by the end of next week.
There’s an easy way to ensure there’s no confusion over the panel’s decision: let it stand and take effect.
That won’t cause any “chaos” in the District, any more than possessing magazines that can hold more than ten rounds has caused chaos in the vast majority of states that haven’t imposed any arbitrary limits on magazine capacity. In fact, as the Court of Appeals panel noted in its decision, it’s the District’s argument deployed in defense of the magazine ban that could lead to real chaos.
On the District’s logic, states could ban two-round or even one round magazines—there’s no reason a semiautomatic firearm cannot fire with an empty or “dummy” magazine so long as there is a round in the chamber. And bans like that would permit states to effectively eliminate any semi-automatic firing capacity and require manual reloading after each shot. In fact, under the District’s view the state could just directly outlaw the semi-automatic firing mechanism because, by itself, that is a harmless component of a firearm and it is not a necessary feature of any gun. That would run contrary to Heller’s central command that states cannot ban the most popular weapons chosen by law-abiding Americans for lawful purposes. For that matter, modern cartridges are not necessary for firing a gun either. If the Second Amendment applied only to those things that are strictly necessary for a gun’s operation, states could ban cartridges so long as primitive musket balls remained a legal alternative ammunition.
The dissenting judge on the panel argued that the 30-round magazine possessed by the defendant in the case is “particularly lethal,” and that there’s a historical tradition of regulating arms that are “particularly capable of unprecedented lethality.” The problem with that, of course, is that there is no historical tradition of banning arms based on firing capacity.
There was an enormous leap between single shot cap-and-ball pistols and Samuel Colt’s revolvers, or breech-loading rifles and lever-action guns that could hold more than a dozen rounds. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the development and adoption of those firearms led to any widespread prohibitions on their use, any more than there’s evidence that the adoption of semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines led to prohibitions or restrictions on magazine capacity.
Magazine bans are a thoroughly modern invention, and despite the dissent’s insistence that the bans are a response to “unprecedented societal concerns” we’ve always been concerned with public safety. We have not, however, tried to ban our way to safety until the late 1960s, and these more recent laws are historical outliers, not evidence of a longstanding tradition. The D.C. Court of Appeals should reject the District’s en banc request and let the panel’s decision stand.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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