Court cites shootings, upholds ruling banning sales

Prohibiting the sale, transfer or possession of largecapacity magazines for firearms is constitutional, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled, reaffirming a lower court’s ruling.

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, Colorado’s largest statebased gun lobby, sued the state in 2016 to overturn two 2013 firearm laws. House Bill 131224 outlawed LCMs, magazines holding more than 15 rounds.

HB 131229 expanded mandatory background checks for firearm sales and transfers. Both were passed a year after the Aurora theater shooting, in which an AR15style semiautomatic rifle, among other weapons, was used to kill 12 people and injure dozens more.

On Thursday, the court of appeals, upholding a prior district court ruling, announced that a division of the court concludes that the “statutes are constitutional as a reasonable exercise of the state’s police power for the protection of public health and safety.”

Furthermore, the court upheld the statutes based, in part, on:

• They reasonably further a legitimate governmental interest in reducing deaths from mass shootings.

• They are reasonably related to the legislative purpose of reducing deaths from mass shootings.

• They do not sweep constitutionally protected activities within their reach.

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners had challenged in court the “facial” constitutionality of both bills.

Plantiffs had argued that the LCM ban should be subject to a “heightened standard of review,” according to the appeal court’s summary. They also argued that the statutes were unconstitutionally broad because they ban “an overwhelming majority of magazines.”

Lawmakers and courts considered the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, in which two assailants shot and killed 13 people and wounded 21 others.

The court found a greater than fourfold increase in mass shootings nationally with LCMs per year comparing preColumbine and postColumbine.

“In the thirtytwo years between and including 1967 and 1998, there were eleven mass shootings with LCMs — approximately one mass shooting every three years,” according to the court ruling. “Since Columbine, in the eighteen years between and including 1999 and 2016, there have been twentyseven mass shootings with LCMs — 1.5 per year.”

The court found that: “Smaller magazines create more pauses in firing, which allow potential victims to take lifesaving measures. We conclude that the statutes are reasonably related to legitimate governmental purpose of reducing deaths from mass shootings.”

The appeals court concluded that the statutes “burden only a person’s opportunity to use an LCM, not a person’s right to bear arms in selfdefense.”