Third Circuit Just Nuked NJ's AR Ban. All of It.
The full appeals court torched New Jersey's 'assault firearm' law and 10-round mag limit — the biggest federal 2A win since Bruen.
- NJ's 'assault firearm' ban is unconstitutional under Bruen — the court found no founding-era historical analog for banning the most commonly owned rifle in America.
- NJ's 10-round magazine cap is also struck down — standard-capacity magazines are protected arms, not regulable accessories.
- This is binding Third Circuit precedent covering New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware — states in those circuits cannot enforce similar bans without facing the same constitutional test.
- A direct circuit split now exists with the Seventh Circuit's Illinois AR ban ruling — forcing the Supreme Court's hand on whether states can ban semiautomatic rifles at all.
Not a three-judge panel. Not a split decision. The *full* Third Circuit — every judge, sitting en banc — looked at New Jersey's ban on commonly owned semiautomatic rifles and its ten-round magazine cap and said: unconstitutional. Both of them. Gone.
This is the biggest federal appellate Second Amendment victory since Bruen rewrote the rules in 2022.
New Jersey called these guns 'assault firearms' — a political label engineered to make millions of law-abiding Americans sound like terrorists. The court wasn't buying it. Applying the Bruen historical-tradition test, the Third Circuit found **zero founding-era analog** for banning the most popular rifle in the country. Zero. You can't outlaw what the Second Amendment explicitly protects, and today a full circuit court put that in writing.
The NRA brought this case. While critics spent years writing the organization's obituary, NRA-ILA's legal team just handed Governor Phil Murphy the most humiliating courtroom loss of his anti-gun career. That's worth saying out loud.
**Don't celebrate and go back to sleep.** Murphy's office will almost certainly file an emergency stay motion and petition the Supreme Court — possibly within days. New Jersey gun owners should not assume the shelves are suddenly clear. Watch Trenton's next move closely; they will not walk away from this quietly.
The stakes go beyond New Jersey. The Seventh Circuit is sitting on Illinois's nearly identical AR ban right now — the same constitutional question, same Bruen framework. A full circuit court just ruled the opposite way. **SCOTUS cannot ignore a circuit split like that forever.** This ruling in Philadelphia may be the forcing function that sends the AR ban question to the Supreme Court once and for all.
The message out of the Third Circuit today is simple and devastating to every statehouse that thinks it can legislate away your rifle: semiautomatic firearms are arms the Second Amendment protects, and any state that bans them is breaking the supreme law of the land.
Watch for the stay motion. Watch Illinois. Watch SCOTUS. **This isn't over — it's just getting good.**
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