The Third Circuit of the federal court of appeals, sitting en banc with all its judges, struck down New Jersey's ban on so-called assault firearms and magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. In a 10-5 decision spanning 192 pages, the court held that semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are plainly in common use for lawful purposes by millions of Americans and that no historical tradition exists to support banning them outright.
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What the Court Actually Held
The majority opinion of the court, written by Judge Arianna Freeman, a Biden appointee, moved quickly past some of the threshold arguments that have tripped up Second Amendment challenges in other circuits.
First, the court declined to limit its ruling to just the Colt AR-15, the narrow focus the district court had taken below. The majority concluded that the record supported ruling on all semi-automatic rifles covered by New Jersey's assault firearm provisions, not just one specific make and model.
Second, and more importantly, the court rejected outright the argument that AR-15s are not even covered by the Second Amendment's text. Some other circuits, and several dissenting judges in this very case, have argued that weapons like the AR-15 are disproportionate to ordinary self-defense needs and therefore fall outside the Amendment's protection entirely. The Third Circuit majority was having none of it.
The reasoning is straightforward and grounded directly in the Supreme Court's own precedent. The Court in Heller defined arms to include all firearms. Semi-automatic rifles are firearms. Therefore they are arms within the meaning of the Second Amendment, and the Constitution presumptively protects the right to keep and bear them.
The analysis is not complicated, and the majority did not pretend it was.
The Common Use Principle Does the Heavy Lifting
Once the court established that AR-15s are covered by the Second Amendment's text, the question became whether New Jersey could justify its ban through historical analogy under the Bruen framework. The majority held it could not, and the reasoning here has implications that extend well beyond New Jersey.
The core principle the majority applied is one the Supreme Court has articulated but never applied directly to an assault weapons ban: bans on weapons in common use for lawful purposes cannot stand under the Second Amendment, regardless of how well-intentioned the regulation is or how sincerely the legislature believed it would reduce violence.
The majority cited Heller and Bruen together for this proposition and concluded that the AR-15's enormous popularity among law-abiding Americans for self-defense, sporting, and other lawful purposes made the historical justification for banning it essentially impossible to establish.
This is a significant move.
Other circuits have worked around the common use question by arguing that AR-15s are somehow categorically different from protected firearms, or by finding historical analogies in regulations the Third Circuit found unpersuasive. The Third Circuit majority closed that door and applied the principle directly.
A Circuit Split Arrives at a Critical Moment
The timing of this decision is not incidental. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear challenges to assault weapons bans in Illinois and Connecticut, positioning the justices to resolve the question the Third Circuit just weighed in on. The creation of a direct circuit split, with the Third Circuit now on one side and other circuits that have upheld similar bans on the other, makes the Supreme Court resolution even more pressing.
What the Third Circuit's decision does is give the Supreme Court a fully developed opposing framework to work from. The majority opinion is thorough, the dissent is substantial, and the legal arguments on both sides have been litigated exhaustively. When the justices take up the Illinois and Connecticut cases, they will have the benefit of 192 pages of careful analysis from a court that went the other way.
What the Dissent Got Wrong
The main dissent, written by Judge Shwartz, made two arguments worth addressing.
First, she criticized the majority for ruling on all semi-automatic rifles rat
her than limiting the analysis to the AR-15 alone.
Second, she argued that AR-15s and large capacity magazines are outside the Second Amendment's protection because they are disproportionate to ordinary self-defense needs.
The second argument is the more revealing one because it exposes the fundamental disagreement about how the Second Amendment analysis should work. The dissent essentially wanted to import a proportionality or interest-balancing test through the back door of the text analysis, asking whether a weapon is more than someone needs for self-defense rather than asking whether it is in common use by law-abiding citizens.
The majority correctly identified this as the kind of judge-empowering interest balancing that the Supreme Court explicitly rejected in Heller. The question under the Second Amendment is not whether a judge thinks a particular weapon is more firepower than a civilian needs. The question is whether the weapon is in common use for lawful purposes, and on that question the data about AR-15 ownership in America is not close.
What This Means for Gun Owners
For gun owners in New Jersey, the immediate practical effect depends on what happens next. New Jersey's attorney general has already signaled the state is considering its options, which likely means a request for a stay of the decision while the state decides whether to seek Supreme Court review.
The ruling does not immediately put AR-15s back on New Jersey gun store shelves while that process plays out.
For gun owners nationally, the decision demonstrates that the Bruen framework, applied faithfully, produces results that protect commonly owned firearms from outright prohibition. It creates the circuit split that makes Supreme Court resolution of the assault weapons question more likely and potentially more imminent.
See also: Second amendment court cases: Landmark U.S. Court Decisions on Concealed Carry
Most importantly for the broader context of everyday Americans, it establishes a detailed legal framework that other circuits and ultimately the Supreme Court will have to engage with directly.
When the Constitution was written, Americans had never seen the West Coast and we amounted to only 13 colonies hugging the eastern seaboard. Arguments are traded back and forth every single day as to whether the Founding Fathers would approve of AR-15s being in the hands of everyday Americans, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter. We will never know.
This is a universal truth that survives all others. We cannot ever hope to win an argument over what they would think, but rather we must embrace what the spirit of the Constitution would hold true and do our best to uphold the values we inherited. America was founded because brave colonialists took up arms against tyranny. George Washington would not have eschewed the AR-15, and neither should the citizens of the country he fought for.
While it is true our founders envisioned a country with more principles than they themselves possessed at the time, we have largely succeeded in building upon what they hoped for us and that applies to our ability to maintain our own autonomy to defend ourselves.
The Broader Principle
At Right To Bear, we believe that responsible gun ownership is a right worth protecting, and that the legal framework surrounding that right deserves serious, informed attention. The Third Circuit's decision is a significant development because it applies the Supreme Court's own stated principles consistently and reaches a conclusion that follows from them logically.
The principle is not complicated.
Laws that ban entire classes of firearms in common use for lawful purposes by millions of Americans cannot be squared with a constitutional guarantee that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The Third Circuit said so plainly, and the Supreme Court will soon have the opportunity to say it for the entire country.
In the meantime, the legal landscape around firearms continues to shift, and the cases working through the courts right now will shape what rights gun owners have for decades to come.
Staying informed, staying engaged, and making sure your rights are protected at every level, legally, practically, and personally, is what responsible ownership looks like in 2026.
While the courts and activists move to defend our rights, you owe it to yourself and your family to look after yours. For residents of New Jersey, and the rest of the responsible gun owners of America, the best thing to pair your brand new AR-15 with is a membership organization that will defend you in criminal or civil court should you be forced to apply your rights liberally in defense of yourself in others.
Sign up for Right To Bear today and get the legal protection you deserve.
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