A federal judge last week denied a preliminary injunction against Delaware’s ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
Two bills- HB 450 and SS 1 for SB 6, ban several kinds of assault weapons and large capacity magazines. The Delaware State Sportsman Association filed suit in July 2022, alleging they violate the Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and the Delaware constitution Several other suits have challenged the bills under the Second and Fourteenth.
But U.S District Court Judge Richard Andrews rejected the request for a preliminary injunction to halt enforcement until the case is tried and a decision reached.
Widener Delaware Law School professor John Culhane says Andrews took a nuanced approach to reach his decision, looking back at a long history of how weapons are dealt with.
“Other weapons that were thought to be too dangerous like bowie knives and even slingshots," Culhane says. "So this idea that the society can’t respond to mass shootings, which the court really emphasized, by restricting the weapons that are quite often used in those shootings, really sort of flies in the face of how we’ve looked at public safety historically.”
Culhane adds that this decision fits squarely with other restrictions on extremely dangerous weapons, pointing to an unlikelyhood that the course of the trial will go the way of the plaintiffs.
“And another problem they have is they have to show that if the junction isn’t granted that they will suffer ‘irreparable harm,’" Culhane says. "And the court says look, there are other guns that can be used for self-defense.”
Culhane notes the judge also cited the difference in damage that a semi-automatic weapon can do versus a handgun, arguing it is unnecessary if someone is only interested in self-defense. He adds that while individual citizens have a right to bear arms, judges are now faced with determining the scope of that right.
Andrews says in his opinion that the Second Amendment is "not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
Culhane says these types of decisions are very much “blue-state, red-state issues,” and can depend, in-part, on how likely state legislatures are to pass gun reforms.
