Maryland's Firearm Safety Act of 2013 was upheld in the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday.
A constitutional challenge brought by a group of citizens argued that the ban on assault and military-style weapons infringes upon their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
While the issue had been ruled on in the same court in Kolbe v. Hogan in 2017, the 2022 Supreme Court case Bruen "clarified how courts are to resolve Second Amendment challenges and rejected part of our approach in Kolbe," wrote Judge Wilkinson in the opinion.
New York State Rife & Pistol Association v. Bruen was decided in 2022 and essentially said states can't require people to have a good reason to get a license for a gun, sending this case back to the court.
The judge continued saying that, considering Bruen, they are still upholding Maryland's ban on assault weapons.
"The assault weapons at issue fall outside the ambit of protection offered by the Second Amendment because, in essence, they are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense."
The Attorney General's office applauded the 10-5 decision today.
"The Court's decision today will save lives," Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a statement. "Access to weapons of war that have no place in our communities causes senseless and preventable deaths."
The law was passed in 2013, in response to the Sandy Hook shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead in Newtown, Connecticut.
Judge Richardson writes in the dissenting opinion that "the Second Amendment is not a second-class right subject to the whimsical discretion of federal judges. Its mandate is absolute and, applied here, unequivocal," adding "the majority grants states historically unprecedented leeway to trammel the constitutional liberties of their citizens."
Judge Wilkinson argues back in the majority opinion, "Our friends in dissent... would go so far as to uphold a facial challenge to the enactment, meaning that there is no conceivable weapon, no matter how dangerous, to which the Act's proscriptions can validly be applied."
