Magpul PMAG magazine Free Colorado high capacity
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From the National Foundation for Gun Rights . . .

Today, the National Foundation for Gun Rights, along with citizens Benjamin Gates and Travis Swartz, filed a lawsuit against Governor Jared Polis and the State of Colorado over the 2013 magazine ban which outlaws the sale of standard capacity magazines in Colorado. 

The National Foundation for Gun Rights (NFGR) and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) will be solely financing this case, which challenges the constitutionality of the law in light of the recent Supreme Court decision NYSRPA v. Bruen. NFGR and RMGO are also currently suing the Town of Superior over their magazine and rifle ban, and were recently granted a temporary restraining order against the implementation of the ordinance.

“When an Obama-appointed judge agrees that Superior is way out of line in banning magazines and rifles, that means it’s game over for gun control,” said Hannah Hill, Research and Policy Director for the National Foundation for Gun Rights. “This lawsuit is the first step in our goal of overturning mag bans nationwide. It’s time for state legislatures to recognize that they actually do have to follow the Second Amendment, and if they plan to double down on rights-shredding laws, they need to prepare to face us in court.”

In the landmark Bruen decision last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected “intermediate scrutiny” – the cost/benefit analysis framework that allowed lower courts to rule against the Second Amendment – and established that the standard for applying the Second Amendment is the text, history, and tradition of the right to keep and bear arms; thereby invalidating the lower court rulings’ justification for gun control. 

The lawsuit funded by the National Foundation for Gun Rights and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners argues that Colorado’s 2013 magazine ban flies directly in the face of the Second Amendment and the rights of law-abiding Coloradans to own standard capacity magazines. The law should be repealed in light of the Bruen decision and the historical text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment.

high capacity magazines
Things Coloradans can’t buy legally. (Dan Z. for TTAG)

“We’ve known for years that the magazine ban is an atrocious infringement against our gun rights, and our members are continuing the fight against this heinous law,” said Dudley Brown, President of the National Foundation for Gun Rights. “The Bruen decision is a 4-ton wrecking ball for us to use against gun control laws – and we’re going to destroy every single unconstitutional law which stands in our way. We founded NFGR to defend gun owners in the courts and use our legal expertise to eviscerate anti-gun rulings — and repealing Colorado’s magazine ban is just one of many legal projects NFGR is working on in the battle to restore the Second Amendment.” 

The National Foundation for Gun Rights plans to also sue other local governments in Colorado which have imposed magazine bans and so-called “assault weapons” bans next, and is currently finalizing the details for those lawsuits.

The full text of the lawsuit filed against Gov. Polis and the State of Colorado in federal district court can be viewed here.

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53 COMMENTS

  1. Some day I will own standard capacity magazines and a AR with detachable magazines and whatever features make sense. Till then still happy to see other states being made great again.

    • There are many of us who own items that were once “legal” in our particular State, then declared “illegal”. Instead of altering, registering, or otherwise complying, we simply disassembled and stored them in a safe, to be brought back out to the light of day once sanity reigns again.

      …or the SHTF and we find ourselves in a WROL (TEOTWAWKI) and must defend against zombies, ChiComs, or scavengers. In the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge quake, people were literally living in tents out in public park areas for weeks due to all the pipe (water, gas) breakages under home foundations and the heavy structural damage. My own home was without power or gas for over a week. Everyone looked out for each other. Three decades later, the community is much, much different and I’ve literally had more than one person tell me they’d simply overpower one of their neighbors and take what they needed, since there would be minimal or no LE to stop them.

      • In most of those cases location will matter more initially for me and mine. For the rest….. well we have a lot of people that fit the description of would be looters you mentioned and nasty surprises await them all around my county as well as my neighboring counties till you hit Albany. Funny enough they do have a mostly inactive fault line that ends right around the capital

  2. Believe it when I see it. Look at the hold out states now. Those in rural NY or California who have carry permits now have a ton more restrictions to worry about. A pig seeing easy prey, and not a violent dindu, will make an easy arrest if you’re found in violation. The courts can’t keep up with the infringements even if they were on our side. And they most definitely are not. Soon enough you will see this when the remanded cases turn up similar results.

    • Time will tell, absent some federal level shenanigans things have gone far better than I expected and exposed far more incompetence in those who would oppress us than I hoped for.

      • “things have gone far better than I expected”

        In what way? Not arguing, just wondering if I missed something. Bruen went better than I expected, but the backlash (wave of new laws) seems much worse than the compliance that followed Heller and MacDonald.

        • I was hoping for strict scrutiny, Bruen far exceeded that. I was expecting immediate but measured restrictions that might survive legal challenges. NY has gone full on infringement and injunctions are actually possible. One way or another a lot of questions about what liberty is will be answered very soon.

        • Yeah, well, the way I’d put it was they didn’t comply with Heller/McDonald. They just ignored it, and they could have afforded to. Bruen is strongly worded enough it can’t be ignored, and the restrictions they passes are the last flares being fired from a sinking ship. The lawmakers passing them know that too. All they can try to do now is stall, and of course they’ll try that, but time is now solidly on the side of gun rights expansion.

        • SAFE,
          OK, so the ruling itself. That makes sense – thanks!

          Random,
          I see the opposite. Bruen was broader, but the losing sides in both Heller and McDonald (some of the most anti-gun jurisdictions in the country) fixed the offending laws. NY not only hasn’t, but is making flank speed in the opposite direction.

          I don’t see how time is on the side of gun rights expansion either. Everyone living under laws contrary to Bruen (including those enacted in reaction / retaliation for Bruen) still faces arrest, 5-6-figure court costs, prison, loss of job or family, etc. No one making or enforcing those laws faces any comparable consequences, or really any consequences whatsoever. They seem to have adopted the “Little Engine that Could” mantra, with no end in sight.

        • Umm honestly the stupidity/desperation from my lawmakers is equal if not greater than the decision. Mistakes are costly in court.

        • Yep. Problem is, our mistakes (or even being completely in the right per Bruen) are costly to us, and their mistakes are costly to us.

        • “Bruen went better than I expected, but the backlash (wave of new laws) seems much worse than the compliance that followed Heller and MacDonald.”

          ‘Bruen’ was a direct *Warning* by Thomas.

          Basically, he was saying – “Do you really want me to grant cert. for this 2A case? Did you not see what I did when I got a carry case dropped in my in-basket? Do you want the same thing to happen to your little gun or magazine capacity ban? Or any other bullshit infringement you might think you can get cute with?”

          *That’s* what’s unsaid in ‘Bruen’. Of course, I really hope they try. The question is, will they have the balls to try, considering the stakes?

          (When they do back down, we need to publicly rub their noses in it, and laugh in their faces at how scared they are of the black man on the highest court in the land…)

        • Geoff,
          Of course they’ll have the balls to try, because they have zero disincentive. I explained “the stakes” in my previous comment. I’ll try again:

          Any citizen with responsibilities and relationshipsloses big from the first moment he is arrested for a felony; the only question is whether or not he loses everything. Even if he eventually “wins”, that just means he stops losing. It doesn’t even guarantee he gets back anything he lost along the way.

          Bruen, other decisions, or laws on the books do not offer any possibility whatsoever for the other side – anyone who makes or enforces unconstitutional laws – to lose anything at all personally. When “the government” loses, they pass the bill on to taxpayers – people with jobs and responsibilities, i.e. mostly us.

          They can make all the BS laws they want. They can arrest anyone they want. At best, we get a “moral victory” in 2-5 years. What about this $hitty situation do you want to rub their noses in?

    • You wouldn’t believe the restrictions LASD puts on their carry permits.

      If you can get one.

      • “You wouldn’t believe the restrictions LASD puts on their carry permits.”

        Oh, I have a vivid imagination.

        The real question is, will you another permit holder risk your permit by challenging those bullshit restrictions?

        • There is scuttlebutt that our AG Bonta is lending his support to a bill (similar to NY’s) in which nearly everything will be declared a “sensitive place” and barred from CCWs, including churches.

          The entire reason why I finally decided to apply for the permit is *because* I need to carry while at church, seeing as I’m part of the security team. In fact, three off-duty LASD on the team proactively encouraged me to apply. If Sacramento ends up banning church carry, then yes, I absolutely will contact Michele & Associates and volunteer to become a plaintiff. For the State to have a path to a permit laid out in front of me, and take my money as I follow that path, and make me wait an unreasonable length of time, and then turn around and tell me I cannot use the permit in the manner for which it was originally intended…that’s bad faith and grounds for a lawsuit.

  3. As a Coloradan and a member of RMGO this is great news. Gonna have to part with some cash to help with this battle. Thank you NFGR and RMGO!

    • Most Coloradans I know don’t comply with mag limits anyway. No douchebag politician is going to tell me how many rounds I get to defend my family with. They can kiss my ass.

      • Yes, we don’t get normal capacity magazines, but we gott legal pot that the state makes a fortune off of, so there is that. Also, we have, umm, dee dee dee dee do…. what were we talking about?

      • Most sheriffs don’t bother to enforce it (Denver and Boulder excluded). The sheriffs filed the original suit against the ban. Independent gun stores will sell you kits to make >15 round mags, if they don’t sell them outright. Kits are legal because they were trying to keep Magpul paying state taxes.

        • Has any otherwise law-abiding citizen been charged with violating the state mag ban? Hopefully RMGO can make something happen this time around, but these law suits always seem to get filed going into an election cycle and never go anywhere.

      • They have to get a vote on allowing it to be called first, under some legislative dodge. I have seen nothing happening yet. I suspect she is still trying to find enough votes to pass it. I suspect it will not be called for a vote until she has them. Or she may try to sneak it through late this evening when a lot of members are absent. You know, like how Gov. Cuomo liked to do things.

    • Where are your priorities, Jim? The NRA isn’t made of money. They’re spending $4M a month on outside counsel to keep.Wayne out of jail. How can you expect them to afford to spend money on court cases dealing with guns?

  4. HAVE BIT OF BOTH , STILL DO JUST FINE WITH STANDARD MAGAZINE FOR SHOOTING PAPER OR STEEL TARGETS . STANDARD GIVES MY TRIGGER FINGER A BREAK , HA .

  5. Well my 4 new ASC LR-308 mags have a built in ban because none of the 4 work. They will feed one round from an open bolt but the primer ends of the other rounds sink down and stay sunk down in the mag, appears to be a spring design and a tilting follower problem even though the ad said no tilt follower. Nonetheless Instead of calling these mags ASC they should call them WTF.

    • Back in the day when the corporation I worked for owned The Sportsman Guide I was buying DPMS steel 20 rounders for $13 each. Got in a goodly stash of them. The Lancers aren’t bad either. Modified a couple of them for use with .45 Raptor.

    • Stamped stainless steel body and polymer follower, right? You could try disassembling them and taking a Dremel to the followers, shaving a hair of material off the outside edges, especially at the back. Or just load and unload manually over and over until they “break in”.

      I’m sure they fit fine when they were assembled at the factory, but as the steel cooled after being fab’d and finished, it probably shrank slightly and now the follower is binding up against the body, especially under the load of having rounds inside.

  6. Our Washington attorney general says they can make all the laws they want without consideration as to constitutionality because it is enforceable law until the Supreme Court says it isn’t. In the meantime, they can stomp all over gun owners with immunity.

    Our 10 rd limit was just implemented on July 1. The state just laughed after California has gotten away with it for years.

  7. So the Second Amendment actually states ‘Standard Capacity Magazines’ does it as a matter of Citizens Rughts ? I never knew that Thank’s for the enlightenment. Now please explain what the nessessity for a 30 round magazine of an Assault Rifle is? Any SEMI-AUTOMATIC Rifle IS an assault Rifle and Is military spec no matter what label you may give it. the only logical use foe r a Semi-Automatic Rifle is to kill, as many PEOPLE as fast as possible and that’s the reason the Militarty use them. A soldier could pick up pretty much any current Semi-Auto on saale in the USA band use it.
    There seems to be an impression that an ASSAULT Rifles has to be fully automatic it does not. For instance the UK and most other NATO Nations do NOT issue fully automatic Rifles though the SA80 does have three shot facility and that’s about the limit of being able to ‘hold on target’ with ‘aimed’ shots even withnthe SA80 which holds on better than most -being built on the heavy side for that very purpose.
    Sooner or later the Gun Nuts of America will, have to face the facts of wholesale slaughternon their streets and accept something has to be done. At the current rate it is estimated that by 2035 there will be between 30 and 35,000 deaths by gun crime in the USA on an annual basis – the rate has already pretty much doubled in the last decade or so. This is TWICE the rate in Ukraine which is engaged in a full blooded bloody war. In 12 years of active service in IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN the US Forces suffered less than 10,000 casualties in 12 years. Only Vietnam amd S.Korea have had MORE military casulaties than the annual rate in CIVILIAN AMERICA.
    The INTERNATIONAL figures are easy to access and in the majority of the Civilised World the number of such casulaties has gone DOWN.
    Just an example. THe TOTAL< number of ILLEGAL DEATHS in the UK wwith a population of around 70 million hovers between 800 and 900 per annum, THat includes ALL homicides from all causes including Gun Crime, Knife Crime, incidents of Domestic Violence, MANSLAUGHTER [where the DEATH of the victim is not the first intention] and Acts of Terrorism TRanslated to the USA which has around 4.5 to 5 times the population of the uK [and I have no reason to think that the UK is anything but around the EUROPEAN average!] and we arrive at a figure of something in the order of 4000/4500 illegal deaths form all causes Instead of which the USA has nearly FIVE times that number from a single cause GUN CRIME. Surely to god that needs some explaining and is source of shame for a supposedly civilised country. ?

    • Albert the Lying Ponce of a Fake Brit,

      IF you were the firearms “expert” you purport to be, you would realize how stupid you sound . . . but since (i) you are a fake Brit, (ii) you know f***-all about firearms, and (iii) you’re a brainwashed Leftist/fascist troll, you continue to come here and spout lies, propaganda, and nonsense. SOD OFF, SWAMPY.

    • Does the First Amendment mention the names of any specific books or websites you’re allowed to write, or churches or synagogues you’re allowed to attend, you lackwit?

      Does the Fourth mention which brands of cabinet are protected against unlawful search and seizure?

      One could write a dictionary-size book cataloguing your ignorance.

      • “Write drunk, edit sober.”

        There’s great truth in that.

        I didn’t pay much attention to my writing back in school, I only took an interest in it when I started posting to the old usenet in the mid-1990s. Back then, I was knocking down the sauce prolifically.

        And I noticed something. The stuff I was writing when blind drunk nearing passout was pretty damn good. The writing just had a natural flow to it. My writing while sober was flat and lifeless. Drunk, I had a couple of my humorous screeds back them show up on someone’s ‘best of the internet’ personal web pages…

  8. I seriously doubt that the corrupt and disingenuous Supreme Court will overturn any of the many state magazine bans. The court is well aware of the fact that the high cap magazine is the tool of choice for maniacs that commit mass murder as well as the tool of far right insurrectionists that tried to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan 6th and when something directly affects the welfare of the corrupt Supreme Court they will vote for their own survival, not on any triviality called the Constitution that they ignore as though it did not exist. Witness the overturn of Roe v/s Wade that also reintroduced slavery , the slavery of the American women as a sex slave, who is now every bit as much of a sex slave as the black women once were on the plantations of the pre-civil war era for right wing run cotton plantations.

    The Stats also have the option of putting so many restrictions on them and taxing them so highly that the average citizen would not be able to afford one or even get a permit to own one or be able to take it anywhere outside his home if the court did rule in favor of an overturn of the myriad of magazine ban laws on the books. It’s just not going to happen.

    • Proves you don’t know what happened on J6, buying the US MSM propaganda!!!

      No guns were carried by protesters on J6, only LEO carried guns and they killed a person with one, who was unarmed!!! Ashley Babbitt!!!

      Recent gun ruling was made after J6, proves another one of your “Propaganda” statements untrue!!!

  9. An interesting test case.

    Colorado basically makes no effort to enforce the law unless it’s a basically a sentencing enhancer/”sweetener” in another much more serious crime. You can buy standard mags at most LGSs. The only places I’ve seen that comply are big chain stores.

    Shit, I’ve even had LE ask me if I wanted them to bring me back mags from out of state. It’s that big of a joke. Most mags the law basically doesn’t apply because it’s impossible to prove the case unless you kept receipts. PMAGs can just “get damaged” by a Dremel or similar tool.

    Given the weakness of the law and the lack of enforcement, it would be probably be an uphill battle for Colorado to argue that there’s an important government interest at stake given that the state makes no effort to enforce the laws directly related to that “important interest”.

    So… keep an eye on it as a test case I guess but until then… carry on ignoring that the law was ever passed.

  10. Hey man, just do like I done here in Colorado… clip about 10 coils off the spring in a 30 rounder – then use the Magpul as a holder/ dispenser for around 50 or so tightly rolled joints.
    And perfectly legal, man – keeps em all in one place and dispenses them one at a time. Now, where did I leave that thing? Sorry, gotta go – emergency just came up

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