Personally, I’d rather such laws didn’t get enacted rather than live through the years it takes for a case to get through the court system
OSD 364: Gun control is quietly having a moment
Huh, normally we like retro vibes.
A few months ago, in “OSD 352: ‘Gun rights are winning and nobody has realized it’, 2025 edition”, we checked in on state-level gun control laws:
Delaware passed an assault weapons ban in 2022 and Illinois and Washington passed one in 2023. Colorado is going to have a permit-to-purchase regime for “assault weapons” in 2026. Those were major setbacks. Previously, we had often cited the pleasing fact that all seven states with AWBs had originally passed them between 1989 and 1994. The idea was that AWBs weren’t a trend, they were a relic from a moral panic. That is no longer entirely true.
This hasn’t been a big topic because it happened on state by state, but it is a sea change. From 1994 to 2022, no state changed its mind in favor of AWBs. But that equilibrium — seven states with AWBs and 43 without — no longer holds. In addition to the states above, Virginia and New Mexico look to be on their way to bans of their own in 2026.
It’s a mirror image of the concealed carry revolution. That also happened state by state, and most of the country was shall-issue before most people even knew that was a trend. The same could happen with AWBs. What will decide that is whether guns continue to build cultural momentum and whether the courts get involved.
On that latter point, a New Mexico ban might have a silver lining. It’s in jurisdiction of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Unlike the circuit courts covering, say, California or New York or Massachusetts, the Tenth Circuit might strike down an AWB. That could generate a circuit split, since other circuit courts to look at the issue have upheld AWBs. And a circuit split makes it likelier for the Supreme Court to accept an AWB case. Justice Kavanaugh has already basically announced that the Court is looking to take such a case in the next 1-2 years.
There’s a “you know you’re over the target when you’re taking flak” aspect to expansions of individual rights. As the rights gain momentum, they provoke a backlash of crackdowns from governments that are hostile to them. So the moment of most contentious backlash is the moment right before you win. But a right has to survive long enough to break through to that point. Keep at it.