U.S. appeals court upholds core of N.Y., Connecticut gun laws

Reuters ^ | 10/19/2015 | Reuters

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Decision at http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/31d95365-88b4-4264-a9fe-4cbbf7df1cb8/3/doc/14-36_14-319_opn.pdf

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From the ruling:

CONCLUSION

To summarize, we hold as follows:

The core prohibitions by New York and Connecticut of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines do not violate the Second Amendment.
(a)
We assume that the majority of the prohibited conduct falls within the scope of Second Amendment protections. The statutes are appropriately evaluated under the constitutional standard of “intermediate scrutiny” — that is, whether they are “substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental interest.”
Because the prohibitions are substantially related to the important governmental interests of public safety and crime reduction, they pass constitutional muster.
(b)
We therefore AFFIRM the relevant portions of the judgments of the Western District of New York and the District of Connecticut insofar as they upheld the constitutionality of state prohibitions on semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.

We hold that the specific prohibition on the non-semiautomatic Remington 7615 falls within the scope of Second Amendment protection and subsequently fails intermediate scrutiny. Accordingly, we REVERSE that limited portion of the judgment of the District of Connecticut. In doing so, we emphasize the limited nature of our holding with respect to the Remington 7615, in that it merely reflects the presumption required by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment extends to all bearable arms, and that the State, by failing to present any argument at all regarding this weapon or others like it, has failed to rebut that presumption. We do not foreclose the possibility that States could in the future present evidence to support such a prohibition.

New York’s seven-round load limit does not survive intermediate scrutiny in the absence of requisite record evidence and a substantial relationship between the statutory provision and important state safety interests. We therefore AFFIRM the judgment of the Western District of New York insofar as it held this provision unconstitutional.

No challenged provision in either statute is unconstitutionally vague. Accordingly, we AFFIRM the judgments of the District of Connecticut and the Western District of New York insofar as they denied vagueness challenges to provisions involving the capacity of tubular magazines, “copies or duplicates,” or a firearm’s ability to “be readily restored or converted.” We REVERSE the judgment of the Western District of New York insofar as it found language pertaining to “versions” and “muzzle breaks” to be unconstitutionally vague.