A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld Maryland's ban on semi-automatic guns with certain military-style features that the state passed after the 2012 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.
The 10-to-4 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit vacates an earlier three-judge panel decision that cast doubt on the constitutionality of the ban that is similar to laws in California, Connecticut and New Jersey.
The court's majority opinion states clearly that "assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not protected by the Second Amendment."
The question for the Richmond-based appeals court was how far the Maryland Legislature could go to limit individual rights to gun ownership and what standard a district judge in Baltimore should have used to assess the law. Last February, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit found that the lower court should have used a more stringent test: The bar should be higher for the state, the panel said, when the government passes a law that affects a right protected by the Constitution.
The majority disagreed in its opinion Tuesday, siding with Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh who said the Second Amendment does not prevent legislators from passing measures designed to protect the public from gun violence.
"It's unthinkable that people could say that those weapons of war are protected by the Second Amendment," Frosh said Tuesday. "Especially when you look at the carnage at Newtown and elsewhere around the country."
Maryland's law does not ban all long guns, rifles or semi-automatic rifles. Gun restrictions enjoy wide support in the Democratic-leaning state, a factor that helped legislators pass some of the nation's strictest gun-control laws in 2013.
The challenge to Maryland's law is one of series of cases that followed the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling that first declared the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to gun ownership rather than one related to military service.
"We have no power to extend Second Amendment protection to the weapons of war that the Heller decision explicitly excluded from such coverage," Judge Robert King wrote in the 4th Circuit opinion, referring to the Supreme Court case known as District of Columbia v. Heller.
The Supreme Court has not gone further to define the parameters of the right, such as the legality of bans on certain weapons or of restrictions on carrying guns outside the home. The high court last year declined to review bans on firearms that New York and Connecticut -- and more recently a Chicago suburb -- have classified as "assault weapons."
Like Maryland, Connecticut's ban was expanded after a gunman used a military-style semi-automatic weapon to kill 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
A Section on 02/22/2017