Bans are particularly inviting targets of pro-2nd Amendment litigation because there is so little support of them in the country’s history. Toward that end, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) has filed a new federal lawsuit challenging Washington D.C.’s ban on firearm magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.
“The magazines at issue in this case are not ‘dangerous and unusual,’ but instead are standard components of the sorts of bearable arms in common use for lawful purposes,” the lawsuit in in Wehr-Darroca v. D.C. argues.
Plaintiffs are William Wehr-Darroca, for whom the suit is named, Gary Stemple, and the Firearms Policy Coalition.
Defendants are The District of Columbia, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela A. Smith, and District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb.
“Washington D.C. is not exempt from the Constitution,” said FPC President Brandon Combs. “FPC continues its work to end these immoral firearm magazine bans and other unconstitutional policies throughout the country.”
Further, the brief states, “Standard capacity magazines do not give rise to ‘unprecedented lethality,’ as a D.C. appeals court claimed in an October 2024 decision. “The modern variants have been widely available and commonly used for at least 100 years, if not longer. Nor are they ‘uncommonly dangerous.’
“More than 700 million of them have been produced and sold over the past 30 years, and at least 40 states have no restrictions at all on magazine capacity. Standard magazines are common in all respects. And they by no means constitute a ‘dramatic technological change, because they emerged through incremental technological improvements over the past 500 years, culminating in the essential modern features more than a century ago. More, the illegal use of protected arms to harm others is not an ‘unprecedented societal concern,” but was known to the Founders and Framers at the time of Ratification, and cannot overcome that these magazines are constitutionally protected and are overwhelmingly used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”
Further, the brief says, “In essence, the trend in incremental technological development has always been toward increased firearm capacity, balanced against reliability, accuracy, portability, and ergonomics. Over the past several centuries, this has led to the current status quo, relatively unchanged since the 1960s, where a majority of handgun magazines have a capacity in excess of ten rounds, and nearly half of all magazines in use today are rifle magazines with a 30+ round capacity.”
Click here to read the complaint.
