Federal judge once again strikes down California’s large-capacity ammunition ban
A federal judge with a penchant for fiery rulings and strong leanings toward the Second Amendment issued an injunction Friday on California’s ban on ammunition magazines with more than 10 rounds, the latest ruling in the now six-year-old legal challenge.
U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez, a President George W. Bush appointee serving in the Southern District of California, did not hold back in his opinion on Duncan v. Bonta.
“This case is about a California state law that makes it a crime to keep and bear common firearm magazines typically possessed for lawful purposes. Based on the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, this law is clearly unconstitutional,” Benitez wrote.
Benitez said that efforts to limit ammunition magazine capacity have been largely arbitrary, with different states arriving at different numbers for how many rounds to allow in a magazine.
“The fact that there are so many different numerical limits demonstrates the arbitrary nature of magazine capacity limits,” he wrote.
In his footnotes, Benitez listed several cases where he said ammunition capacity was a matter of life and death for lawful gun owners.
“There have been, and there will be, times where many more than 10 rounds are needed to stop attackers,” he wrote. “...Woe to the victim who runs out of ammunition before armed attackers do. The police will mark the ground with chalk, count the number of shell casings, and file the report.”
Benitez also repeated an argument he has made in the past, that mass shootings are the actions of a “few mad men.” There have been 34 mass shootings in the state of California in 2023 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The judge’s ruling was bombastic but not shocking. He frequently rules in favor of Second Amendment challenges to California gun control laws, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to once label him “a stone cold ideologue” and “a wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association.”
Benitez previously struck down California’s ban on assault weapons, likening assault rifles to Swiss Army knives that are “good for both home and battle.”
Benitez stayed Friday’s ruling for 10 days in order to give California Attorney General Rob Bonta time to file an appeal. The attorney general has vowed to do so.
“In the past half-century, large-capacity magazines have been used in about three-quarters of gun massacres with 10 or more deaths and in 100 percent of gun massacres with 20 or more deaths,” Bonta said in a statement.
“We will continue to fight for our authority to keep Californians safe from weapon enhancements designed to cause mass casualties. In the meantime, if the Ninth Circuit stays the decision pending appeal, large-capacity magazines will remain unlawful for purchase, transfer, or possession in California.”
This isn’t the first time Benitez struck down California’s large-capacity ammunition ban. He did so originally in 2019 — when the case was still called Duncan v. Becerra, for then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra — only for the case to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which kicked it back down for further proceedings.
