New Jersey's assault weapons ban is dead, and a Biden judge just wrote the obituary

The bottom line

The full Third Circuit just struck down New Jersey’s assault weapons ban and its ten round magazine limit in one 192 page opinion, 10 to 4, en banc. No federal appeals court in this country has ever done that to either law, let alone both on the same day. And the judge who wrote it was appointed by Joe Biden.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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Ten to four, and it wasn’t close

On July 17, 2026, the Third Circuit sitting en banc handed down its ruling in ANJRPC v. Platkin, consolidated with Cheeseman v. Platkin and Ellman v. Platkin. New Jersey’s “assault firearms” ban, on the books since 1990, is unconstitutional as applied to the entire class of semi-automatic rifles the state tried to outlaw. The state’s ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds falls with it. Ten judges joined the judgment. Four dissented. No federal appeals court had ever struck down either kind of law before. This one took out both at once.

I’ve watched this fight long enough to know how rare that combination is. Six other circuits looked at laws just like these and upheld every one of them. Ocean State Tactical, Bianchi v. Brown, Duncan v. Bonta, all the way down the line, courts kept finding a way to say bans on the most commonly owned rifle in America don’t burden the right to keep and bear arms. The Third Circuit looked at the same history and the same Supreme Court precedent and came out the other way. That’s a court actually following Heller and Bruen instead of engineering a result.

A Biden appointee wrote this, and that should terrify gun control advocates

Judge Arianna Freeman wrote the majority opinion. She’s a Biden appointee, the first woman of color ever to sit on the Third Circuit, and she came in with a glowing endorsement from the Alliance for Justice. Not a judge anybody expected to hand Second Amendment supporters the biggest circuit court win of the assault weapons debate. She did it anyway, and the opinion isn’t hedged or narrow. Judge Phipps joined her “in nearly every respect.” Judge Mascott concurred in the judgment through an opinion joined by Judge Matey. Judge Chung would have sent the whole case back down rather than resolve it now. Judges Shwartz, Krause, Restrepo, and Smith dissented, and Krause’s dissent admits the significance of it, calling the majority the only court of appeals in the nation to reach this conclusion.

Jennifer Mascott’s confirmation fight mattered here. She was confirmed to the Third Circuit days before oral argument in this case, after a brutal nomination process, and personnel is policy. That seat existing when it did is part of why this outcome was possible. Every fight over every judicial nomination is a fight over rulings exactly like this one, years down the road.

The logic is simple, which is exactly the point

What actually won this case is not complicated, and that’s what makes it so damning for every court that ruled the other way. The analysis runs in three steps, and each one is straight out of Heller and Bruen.

Step one, semi-automatic rifles are arms. Heller defines an arm as any weapon of offense or defense, covering modern instruments people use for self-defense, not some frozen 1791 list. Even the narrowest founding-era definitions of the word cover firearms generally. There’s no serious argument that an AR-15 pattern rifle isn’t an arm under the Second Amendment.

Step two, common use decides the question, and the court placed that inquiry inside the historical analysis, which is exactly where the Supreme Court pointed in Wolford three weeks ago. Millions of these rifles are in circulation right now, owned by law abiding people for lawful purposes. That is common use, and Heller and Bruen both say weapons in common use for lawful purposes cannot be banned because there is no tradition in American history of banning them.

Step three, and this is where New Jersey’s case fell apart. The state built its historical tradition out of Bowie knife statutes, gunpowder storage rules, and trap gun bans. None of it holds up. A rule about storing flammable gunpowder is a safety regulation, not a ban on owning a class of weapons, the same way a fertilizer storage code isn’t a ban on farming. Trap gun statutes punished a method of rigging a weapon to fire unattended, not ownership of a rifle. The court went through every analog New Jersey offered and found none of them relevantly similar to a possession ban on a class of arms Americans commonly own. Other circuits found these analogs persuasive. This court, with all fifteen judges looking at it together, didn’t.

I don’t think that’s a hard call, and I never did. Rifles are arms. They’re in common use. There’s no history of banning them. You don’t need a law degree to follow that chain, just a court willing to actually follow it instead of hunting for a reason to reach a different answer.

New Jersey went for the whole class, and the whole class fell

This wasn’t a narrow win. Judge Peter Sheridan’s district court order below only reached the Colt AR-15 by name, and only for use in the home. The Third Circuit modified that order to cover every semi-automatic rifle New Jersey’s law tried to ban, for any lawful purpose, anywhere, and struck the magazine ban outright. That’s a sweeping ruling, not a technical fix aimed at one brand name.

I want to be straight about what this doesn’t do yet. New Jersey’s listed pistols and shotguns were remanded for further proceedings, so that part of the law is still unresolved. The mandate hasn’t issued. New Jersey can seek a stay or petition the Supreme Court for certiorari. Nothing about this changes what you can legally buy in a gun store in New Jersey today. Anybody telling you to go buy an AR-15 in Trenton this week is wrong, and getting that wrong could get somebody arrested. This is a permanent en banc ruling, not a temporary restraining order, and only the Supreme Court can reverse it, but the process still has to play out.

Why this changes the math at the Supreme Court

This ruling matters more than any single circuit decision usually would. The Supreme Court granted cert on June 30, 2026 in Viramontes v. Cook County (No. 25-238), consolidated with Grant v. Higgins (No. 25-566), putting the AR-15 common use question in front of the justices next term. I already thought we were favored to win that case. Now I think it’s close to a formality.

Count the votes with me. Kavanaugh, Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas are with us. That’s four. The real question has always been Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts. Ask yourself what it looks like when a Biden appointed judge, celebrated by the Alliance for Justice, writes a 192 page opinion striking down two gun control laws, 10 to 4, with barely any daylight in the vote. There is no version of this where Barrett lets herself be more cautious on the Second Amendment than a judge nominated by Joe Biden. This ruling hands the Supreme Court total cover to rule decisively, because it proves the reasoning isn’t some fringe conservative theory. It’s what the law says when you read it honestly, and now a left leaning appointee has said so at length with an en banc court behind her.

It also matters that this landed just eight days after the Seventh Circuit upheld Illinois’s assault weapons ban in Barnett v. Raoul. That’s as clean a circuit split as you’ll find, opposite conclusions on the same question a week and a half apart. The Supreme Court doesn’t get to sit on this much longer. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief supporting the challengers on September 19, 2025, the same office now suing Virginia over SB 749 in United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia. The federal government has made its position clear, and now a circuit court is on record agreeing with it.

Virginia, I haven’t forgotten about you

I’d be lying if I said Virginia wasn’t on my mind reading through this ruling. SB 749, the Commonwealth’s own assault weapons ban, is currently enjoined statewide thanks to Crump v. Katz, and Attorney General Jay Jones is appealing that injunction. This ruling doesn’t bind Virginia’s courts. It’s not our circuit. But it’s one more brick in a wall that gun control states are finding harder and harder to ignore, and it tells the Fourth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court which way the honest legal analysis points.

I want relief in Virginia before the Supreme Court ever has to touch Viramontes. That’s still the goal. But if it takes a nationwide ruling to finish what Crump started, July 17 just made that outcome a lot more likely than it was the day before.