The bottom line
The Supreme Court has agreed to conference Duncan v. Bonta, the case challenging California’s ban on magazines that hold more than ten rounds. The en banc Ninth Circuit upheld that ban using reasoning so detached from Bruen and Heller that it reads less like legal analysis and more like a deliberate act of defiance. SCOTUS conferencing the case is meaningful news. But I am going to be honest with you about where I think this actually goes.
This article is based on commentary from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
How the Supreme Court currently decides Second Amendment cases
Before getting into what the Ninth Circuit did and why it matters, you need to understand the two-part legal framework that the Supreme Court uses. These two standards are distinct and they get confused constantly, so let me lay them out clearly.
The first is the Heller standard. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) established that the Second Amendment protects any arm that is in common use for lawful purposes. This is a categorical rule. If a type of arm is commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, a total ban on that category is unconstitutional. Full stop. It doesn’t matter how the government feels about the arm, how scary it looks, or how large-capacity its magazines are.
The second is the Bruen test, which comes from New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, fundamentally restructured how courts are supposed to evaluate gun regulations. Under Bruen, the analysis works like this: if a regulation implicates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, it is presumptively unconstitutional. The burden then shifts entirely to the government. To save the law, the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation as of the founding era. If the government cannot point to a historical analog from that period, the law fails. No balancing test. No interest-group weighing. Just history and text.
This was an enormous win for the Second Amendment. People who criticize Bruen online are, without exception, people who want gun control and are upset that this standard makes it much harder to justify. I understand that’s a blunt thing to say, but it is accurate. The test puts the government on defense, and the government almost never wins that fight because the founders simply did not regulate firearms in the ways that modern anti-gun legislatures want to.
What California did and what the Ninth Circuit did with it
California defines any magazine capable of holding more than ten rounds as a “large capacity magazine” and bans their possession outright. The state legislature enacted this through Senate Bill 1446 in 2016. The practical effect is a ban on the standard-capacity magazines that ship with the overwhelming majority of handguns and rifles sold in the United States. The Glock 17, one of the most common handguns in America, ships with a 17-round magazine. Under California law, that magazine is contraband.
The case challenging this ban, Duncan v. Bonta, reached the en banc Ninth Circuit, meaning all the active judges of the circuit sat together to decide it. On March 20, 2025, by a divided court, they upheld the ban. The majority opinion was authored by Judge Graber and the reasoning employed is genuinely breathtaking in how far it strays from what the Supreme Court actually said.
The majority first held that magazines are not “arms” within the meaning of the Second Amendment at all. They are merely accessories, the court said, and therefore the Heller standard does not protect them. This is wrong as a matter of constitutional law and wrong as a matter of basic logic. The Supreme Court has held in First Amendment contexts that a targeted tax on ink is unconstitutional because ink is instrumentally necessary to the exercise of a protected right. The same principle applies here with obvious force. A magazine is not a peripheral accessory. It is a functional component of the firearm itself. Without a magazine, a semi-automatic pistol does not fire. A ban on magazines of a certain capacity is functionally a ban on any firearm that uses them at a given capacity level. Calling this merely an “accessory” regulation is semantic evasion dressed up in legal language.
The majority then held, in the alternative, that even if magazines were protected arms, California’s ban satisfies Bruen’s historical tradition requirement. And here is the part that should make every gun owner’s blood boil. The historical analog the court invoked was a founding-era gunpowder storage law. A law that regulated where and in what quantities gunpowder could be stored for fire safety reasons. That is the historical tradition they cited to justify banning standard-capacity magazines in 2025. Not a law limiting magazine capacity. Not a law restricting the ammunition a militia member could carry. A fire code.
I want you to sit with that for a second. The full Ninth Circuit, all those judges with their law degrees and their clerks and their decades of legal experience, read Bruen, and their best argument for upholding California’s magazine ban is that the founders had gunpowder storage regulations. There is no intellectually honest reading of Bruen that permits this. The gunpowder storage laws were public safety measures aimed at preventing urban fires, not regulations of the type or capacity of arms that citizens could possess. There is no meaningful historical analog between the two. The majority knew this. They reached the conclusion they wanted and worked backwards to find something that could plausibly be called supporting precedent. It is not a good-faith legal analysis. It is result-oriented jurisprudence masquerading as historical scholarship.
Four judges dissented. Judge Bumatay, joined by Judges Ikuta, R. Nelson, and VanDyke, would have held that nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or the nation’s historical tradition justifies the magazine ban. That dissent is the correct reading of the law. The majority opinion is not.
What the Supreme Court conferencing this case actually means
In August 2025, the plaintiffs petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari. The petition includes not just the Second Amendment question but also a Fifth Amendment takings question: California is forcing people to either turn in or destroy magazines they lawfully own, without compensation. The petition has drawn amicus support from 27 state attorneys general, Gun Owners of America, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, and others.
The Supreme Court has now distributed the case for conference, which was initially set for November 21, 2025. This is genuinely significant. It means at least one justice flagged the petition as warranting serious consideration by the full conference. The Court does not distribute every petition. Reaching the conference stage is meaningful.
Now let me tell you what I actually think happens next, because I am not going to blow smoke.
I do not think the Court takes this case this term. I think it is more likely they relist it, meaning they keep discussing it at successive conferences without granting or denying, which is a sign that the justices are interested but uncertain. The Roberts Court has already granted cert in two major Second Amendment cases for this term: Wolford v. Lopez, which concerns Hawaii’s restrictions on carrying in places open to the public, and United States v. Hemani, which addresses whether marijuana users can be stripped of their Second Amendment rights under federal law. Taking a third Second Amendment case in the same term would be unusual. The Court typically wants to manage the pace of major constitutional rulings.
What is most likely is that the Court continues to relist Duncan while watching how Wolford and Hemani develop, and then either takes it next term or waits for a cleaner vehicle. The case may also be pushed down to lower courts with instructions to reconsider in light of whatever the Court says in Wolford.
My honest read: if the Court does take Duncan, California loses. There is no world in which this Supreme Court, with its current composition, upholds a ban on magazines that are among the most commonly owned firearm components in the country, based on the argument that they are not “arms” and that gunpowder storage laws from the 1780s constitute an adequate historical analog. That argument fails under any honest application of Bruen and Heller. A California loss here would mean the standard-capacity magazine bans currently in effect in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington would all be constitutionally vulnerable.
That is exactly why I want the Court to take this case.
The actual absurdity of the 10-round limit
I know this is separate from the constitutional analysis, but I want to address it because the policy underpinning this law makes no sense on its own terms either. The premise of a magazine capacity restriction is that limiting rounds available will meaningfully reduce the lethality of mass shootings. The data does not support this. The overwhelming majority of gun violence in the United States involves one person shooting another person, and the typical incident involves far fewer than ten rounds fired. Magazine limitations do essentially nothing to address the statistical reality of gun violence.
What a 10-round limit does accomplish is making life harder for law-abiding gun owners. It means that a woman defending herself in her home against multiple intruders has to stop and reload when the standard-capacity magazine that came with her factory pistol runs dry. It means that competitive shooters have to modify their equipment to comply with rules that serve no demonstrated public safety purpose. It means that law-abiding Californians are criminalized for possessing magazines they legally bought, in some cases decades ago, while criminals who want high-capacity magazines can and do simply modify standard magazines or source them illegally.
The law is not a serious crime-fighting measure. It is harassment of people who did nothing wrong, dressed up in the language of public safety.
Where we actually stand
The Ninth Circuit has issued a ruling that treats Supreme Court precedent as a menu from which judges can selectively order items that support their preferred outcome. They ignored the plain logic of Heller, stretched Bruen’s historical tradition requirement beyond any recognizable application, and upheld a ban that criminalizes possession of standard-capacity magazines carried by hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans.
The Supreme Court conferencing Duncan v. Bonta tells me that at least some justices recognize this ruling for what it is. Whether they decide to correct it this term or wait for a future vehicle, the underlying legal question has a right answer. Magazines are constitutionally protected. The historical tradition argument the Ninth Circuit offered is embarrassingly thin. And when this Court eventually takes up the question directly, California’s ban will not survive.
The Roberts Court moves slowly. I wish it moved faster. But the direction of travel on Second Amendment jurisprudence since Heller has been toward greater protection, not less, and this case, whenever it arrives, will be no exception.
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