A federal appeals court on Monday upheld parts of New York and Connecticut gun control laws banning semiautomatic assault rifles and large-capacity magazines, ruling the measures passed after a 2012 school massacre did not violate the Constitution.
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Both laws were created following the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, when 26 children and staff at an elementary school were shot and killed by a single gunman.
New York and Connecticut’s new gun control laws are a few of the toughest in the country, along with those in California, Maryland, New Jersey and Massachusetts, according to the Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence. “But gun-control legislation “need not strike at all evils at the same time” to be constitutional”.
The appeals court addressed several gun rights groups’ arguments, including that mass shootings are rare events that would be minimally affected by gun control laws.
“But now a panel of three judges on the the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals say they disagree”. The particular provision of New York’s law regulating load limits, however, does not survive the requisite scrutiny.
Residents of both states, Cabranes reasoned, still may purchase non-semiautomatic guns or any semiautomatic gun that does not have the specific miltary-style features to qualify it as an assault weapon. Nothing in the SAFE Act will outlaw or reduce the number of ten‐round magazines in circulation. The court, however, upheld the core provisions of the two laws that banned semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity magazines. The judges reversed New York’s ban of magazines loaded with more than seven rounds of ammunition and Connecticut’s ban of the non-semiautomatic Remington 7615.
The New York and Connecticut laws met resistance from a coalition of firearms dealers, sport-shooting enthusiasts and Second Amendment purists who argued the laws infringe on the right to bear arms. We’ve clearly done that.
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Attorney General Eric Schneiderman applauded the court’s ruling, stating, “I am very pleased that the Court upheld nearly every aspect of the law”.
