When the Washington state Supreme Court upheld the state’s prohibition on magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds, no one was particularly surprised.
Washington has been on a gun control binge since 2014, but the legislature went into overdrive after voters approved Initiative 1639 in 2018.
First, how well have all these new gun control laws worked?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Washington’s overall homicide rate has soared 77% since 2014, including a 45% jump from 2018 to 2023. When guns are involved, the rate rose 139% since 2014 and 77% since 2018.
Not only did the homicide rate jump after Washington became addicted to gun control, but the percentage of homicides committed with firearms rose 22% from 2018 to 2023.
So, more homicides and more homicides committed with guns. Washington’s gun control laws have worked about as well as they ever do: Not at all.
However, that doesn’t mean the state’s highest court can’t uphold them, as we saw in Washington State v. Gator’s Custom Guns.
In its 7-2 decision, the court said magazines are not arms and aren’t protected by the Second Amendment, completely ignoring that magazines are a vital component of self-loading firearms. It also trotted out other arguments, such as the completely bogus claims that these magazines were originally intended for the military. The Winchester Model 1907 was available with magazines holding up to 15 cartridges. The Model 1907, along with the Model 1903, Model 1905, and the 1905 Remington Autoloading rifle, were developed for and marketed to American hunters.
The state also relied on the ‘expert’ opinion of Lucy Allen, who has been cited in several magazine-ban challenges, including in California and Connecticut.
Allen is the researcher who said the average number of shots fired in a defensive gun use was 2.2 to 2.4, depending on which court her testimony was used in. She also claimed it was very uncommon for more than ten shots to be fired.
However, Allen’s research was pure hokum. It was never subjected to peer review or any other outside verification; it couldn’t be replicated; and it relied on hearsay. Her testimony was criticized by U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez in his opinion in Duncan v. Bonta, a challenge to California’s magazine restrictions.
In 2019, Michel & Associates, a leading 2A law firm, filed a motion to have Allen’s testimony excluded because it failed to meet the standards for evidence.
To sum up, everything the Washington state Supreme Court used as an excuse to uphold the ban was garbage (other terms may apply).
But, in an event comparable to the parting of the Red Sea, there was a dissent, written by a liberal-leaning Democrat, stating such bans were unconstitutional.
In her dissent, which begins on page 20 of the ruling, Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud trashed the arguments used by the court. Not only did she dismiss the arguments accepted by the majority, she called out the state’s motivation:
“Finally, the State argues that we should view our nation’s early limits on the right to keep and bear arms at an extremely high level of generality—so high that we characterize those old laws as barring weapons once society weighs their utility against their danger and decides that they are too dangerous. But that is precisely the sort of policy-laden interest-balancing that the United States Supreme Court dissenting) has explicitly barred under the Second Amendment. And it is the sort of interest-balancing that repressive governments have historically used to suppress opposition.”
The arguments supporting magazine bans are dubious at best. It’s not a stretch to call them lies. And it’s a breath of fresh air to see a high-ranking state judge do exactly that.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago and has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
