The long-awaited oral arguments before the Washington State Supreme Court in the case of State of Washington v. Gator’s Custom Guns Inc., are scheduled to be heard Tuesday, Jan. 14 at 9 a.m. in Olympia.
This is the challenge of Washington’s 2022 ban on so-called “large-capacity magazines” which was supported by Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who will soon become governor. While the law does not prohibit possession of such magazines which were owned before the statute took effect, it does prohibit the sale, purchase, importation and manufacture of new magazines. The outcome could have national implications.
When Gator’s Custom Guns, based in Kelso near the southwestern Washington city of Vancouver, refused to comply with the law, Ferguson’s office launched an investigation and ultimately filed a lawsuit. Defended by the Silent Majority Foundation, the gun shop prevailed at trial last April when Cowlitz County Superior Court Judge Gary Bashor ruled the law unconstitutional.
The ruling infuriated Ferguson, who scrambled to secure a stay from the state Supreme Court after declaring in a news release, “Today’s decision is incorrect and we will immediately file a motion asking the State Supreme Court to keep this public safety law in effect. Every court in Washington and across the country to consider challenges to a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines under the U.S. or Washington Constitution has either rejected that challenge or been overruled. This law is constitutional. It is also essential to addressing mass shootings in our communities. This law saves lives, and I will continue to defend it.”
Judge Bashor cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling in his 55-page decision.
Ammoland News reached out to the Silent Majority Foundation but did not receive an immediate response.
Last year, after Judge Bashor handed down his decision, the magazine ban was effectively derailed for 88 minutes, according to the Center Square. During that time period, Gator’s Guns sold a lot of original capacity magazines until the state high court issued its stay.
In a 38-page amicus brief, the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility along with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said they supported passage of the magazine ban (Senate Bill 5078) “for a simple reason: SB 5078 has saved, and will continue to save, Washingtonian’s lives.”
According to Washington Homicide, which is not connected to any law enforcement agency, last year saw 12 multiple victim homicides, accounting for a total of 28 victims, so it may be arguable whether the magazine ban has saved any lives since it was imposed.
In a news release, the Silent Majority Foundation stated, “Research indicates that 90% of mass shootings occur in so-called ‘gun-free zones.’ While proponents of gun control often argue that the United States’ mass shooting problem stems directly from Second Amendment protections, they claim stricter gun laws modeled after other countries are the solution. However, this narrative overlooks historical precedence and does not hold up under closer scrutiny of the data.”
The foundation points to data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which notes on its website, “Between 1998 and 2024, the number of mass public shootings averaged 3.9 attacks, 32.3 murdered per year, and the number murdered per attack was 7.8. The number of attacks is increasing at an increasing rate, while the number of people murdered and the number murdered per attack is declining. In five-year intervals, the number of mass public shootings varied this way: 2.0 (2000-2004), 3.6 (2005-2009), 3.2 (2010-2014), 4.8 (2015-2019), and 5.6 (2020-2024). In five-year intervals, the number of people murdered in mass public shootings varied this way: 10 (2000-2004), 29 (2005-2009), 24 (2010-2014), 62.4 (2015-2019), and 38.4 (2020-2024).”
In its 27-page amicus brief to the state high court, the Second Amendment Foundation, which is headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., “In short, this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation does not include any Founding Era regulations which restrict the amount of ammunition that can be stored at one time or in any one location.”
SAF further observed, “The Capacity Mandate burdens the right to self-defense in order to mitigate the purported danger posed by ‘weapons that were invented for offensive purposes and were ultimately proven to pose exceptional dangers to innocent civilians’…No historical analogue exists to carry ESSB 5078 through the analysis required by Bruen. Accordingly, the decision of the trial court should be affirmed.”
On its website, in a short essay dated Dec. 30, 2024, which responds to the Alliance/Brady Center brief, the Silent Majority Foundation writes:
“Respondents have briefed the standard necessary to have a statute repugnant to the constitution–which ESSB 5078 is–declared unconstitutional. But Respondents note here the irony that amici AGR and Brady misconstrue Respondents’ position that the federal and state constitutions should be analytically “collapsed” into a single, uniform test. That is not so; Respondents merely point out that this Court has previously determined that “application of the United States Constitution establishes a floor below which the state courts cannot go to protect individual rights. But states of course can raise the ceiling to afford greater protections under their own constitutions.”
“Logically, that means that if ESSB 5078 violates the United States Constitution–which it does–then it also violates the Washington Constitution. From an analytical standpoint, it also means that means-end scrutiny is not the correct mode of analysis, as recent U.S. Supreme Court cases have foreclosed such an approach in Second Amendment cases. It would be an awkward fit to have means-end scrutiny unavailable when analyzing the federal constitution, which establishes the “floor” of protection, while the state constitution, which can provide “greater protections” is analyzed from a means-end perspective. Regardless, intermediate scrutiny is not the proper level as urged by Appellant and Amici.”
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
Strict scrutiny logic is a high hurdle. It needs to be. Potential tyrants are willing to leap over lower hurdles in order to oppress a free people.
Did the SCOTUS not cover this crap with the Bruen decision already ? What part of the Bruen decision do these idiot liberals not understand ?
Communist infringer and aspiring dictator Ferguson needs to be reminded that he lives in America, not China. Maybe getting hung for treason would teach him.
Every American must exert and exercise his and her rights, from free speech to arms to relinquishing consent of the governed when government abuses its powers, to removing those abusers be they politicians or bureaucrats. En masse, exercise rights, irrespective of unconstitutional laws. Every man and woman in Washington should have gathered on weekends at the state capital or local city courthouse with their “banned” standard capacity mags openly displayed among their arms, and berated the authoritarian weasels, explaining “we will not consent nor concede to having our rights infringed, and you can’t do Jack about it- you can’t arrest… Read more »
Mass shooting have been going on since the creation of firearms before that swords spears arrows before that rocks clubs and so on. The elected if allowed would ban gas stoves v8 engines they might even confuse science whether a boy is a girl or a girl is a boy they might even want to use taxpayer dollars to change the sex of children with out the parents consent. Maybe they would go as far as to call parents terrorist who question there public school discission making process on something as important as math calling it common core which has… Read more »
Here we go again! Supreme court says you cannot ban magazines for AR’s yet washington/oregonistan/ seems to think they can.
The Supreme decision has been made. If you don’t have to follow it, then how can it be Supreme?