On May 8, in its 7-2 decision by Justice Charles Johnson in State v. Gator's Custom Guns, the Washington Supreme Court upheld the state ban on the import and sale of magazines that hold over ten rounds. Last year I posted "Injunction Against Washington Magazine Ban Stayed Within Minutes," explaining how Superior Court Gary B. Bashor's 55-page preliminary injunction against the ban was stayed just 49 minutes after the state filed its appeal brief with the Supreme Court. The case is now remanded to consider the State's consumer-protection enforcement action against Gator's for alleged violation of the ban.
The court followed the now-familiar script that "large capacity magazines (LCMs) are not 'arms' within the meaning of either constitutional provision, nor is the right to purchase LCMs an ancillary right necessary to the realization of the core right to possess a firearm in self-defense." That is the case both under the federal Second Amendment and under Washington's guarantee that "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired…."
Based on Heller's quotation from a 1771 dictionary defining "arms" as anything that a man "useth in wrath to cast at … another," the court said that "the LCM itself does not cast the round but feeds the round into the firearm." Further, such magazines are supposedly not "integral components" of firearms because no firearm requires a magazine of the subject capacity to operate.
