New Jersey’s top Democrats are lashing out at the Third Circuit because the en banc court finally applied Bruen the way the Supreme Court wrote it—demanding real historical evidence instead of post-hoc public-safety slogans. By striking down the state’s semiautomatic-rifle and magazine bans, the court exposed how little empirical or historical grounding the restrictions ever had; the attorney general and Senate president are now trying to reframe a legal defeat as a public-safety crisis, hoping voters won’t notice that their own lawyers couldn’t meet the constitutional test. The rhetoric is familiar: every time a ban falls, officials pivot from “this saves lives” to “activist judges are endangering us,” revealing that the policy was always more about control than data.

For the 2A community the ruling is more than a win in one circuit—it signals that Bruen’s text-and-history standard is beginning to bite even in states that spent decades building regulatory walls around the right to keep and bear arms. The decision narrows the space for future magazine and feature bans by forcing governments to produce analogues from 1791 or 1868 rather than modern studies cherry-picked after the fact, and it hands litigators a stronger precedent to challenge copycat laws elsewhere. Gun owners in New Jersey and neighboring states now have clearer runway to seek relief from restrictions that never rested on solid constitutional footing, while anti-gun legislators are left with fewer tools to disguise policy preferences as historical tradition.