The most consequential fact about the en banc Third Circuit’s decision striking down New Jersey’s semi-automatic rifle and magazine bans is not the holding. It is the authorship. The opinion in Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Attorney General New Jersey, consolidated with Cheeseman v. Davenport, was written by Judge Arianna J. Freeman — appointed to the Third Circuit by President Joe Biden, the first Black woman ever to serve on that court, and a career federal defender before taking the bench. The syllabus tells the story:
“FREEMAN, Circuit Judge, filed the Opinion of the Court with whom CHAGARES, Chief Judge, and HARDIMAN, BIBAS, PORTER, MATEY, MONTGOMERY-REEVES, and BOVE, Circuit Judges, join, and with whom PHIPPS, Circuit Judge, joins in part.”
Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, President Biden’s other appointee to the court, joined in full. Two Biden appointees sit in this majority alongside judges appointed by George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
The “Radical Right-Wing Ruling” Narrative Is Unavailable
The anti-gun movement’s reflex after every Second Amendment victory is to blame a judiciary captured by the radical right. That script fails here, and anyone who repeats it should be corrected immediately. The majority opinion holding that AR-15 bans violate the Second Amendment was authored by a progressive Biden appointee and joined by a second. This was not a partisan artifact; it is what District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), require of any judge who reads them honestly rather than working backward from a preferred result.
That matters at One First Street. Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts bristle at the suggestion that they belong to a judicial “team,” and they are right to: they decide cases independently, and the results follow from the law. A ruling authored by a Biden appointee demonstrates that the unconstitutionality of semi-automatic rifle bans is becoming the mainstream legal answer, not a partisan one — and that gives every justice cover to say so.
Why a Former Federal Defender Sees These Laws Clearly
Before her appointment, Judge Freeman spent her career in the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia. I do not think that background is incidental to this outcome. The criminal law has always distinguished crimes that are mala in se — evil in themselves, like murder, robbery, and arson — from crimes that are mala prohibita, offenses only because a legislature declared them so. Every modern gun-control possession crime falls in the second category. A rifle with the wrong cosmetic features in a closet in Toms River harms no one. A polymer magazine that holds eleven rounds instead of ten harms no one. New Jersey made felons out of people for owning objects, not for wronging anyone.
Career defense lawyers watch prosecutors use exactly these possession offenses as shortcuts — convicting a defendant they could not convict of any true crime because he owned the wrong item. My own view is blunt: if the government believes a man is dangerous, it should prove a real crime to a jury or let him go free. A judge who spent years watching mala prohibita charges deployed that way understands precisely what an “assault firearms” possession felony is.
The Talking Point That Died on July 17
Until this decision, the anti-gun movement could recite that every federal court of appeals to rule on an AR-15 or magazine ban had sided with the government — most recently the Seventh Circuit’s 2-1 decision in Barnett v. Raoul upholding Illinois’s ban on July 9, 2026. That talking point is now dead. The Third Circuit has answered it, at full en banc strength, eight days later.
The lone Republican-appointed vote we lost, Judge D. Brooks Smith, was first appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1988 and elevated by George W. Bush in 2002. Some judges of that law-and-order generation absorbed the view that firearms belong chiefly to police and soldiers. The modern bench — very much including the Trump appointees — reads the Second Amendment as the Founders wrote it, and the generational contrast in this case could not be sharper.
A Court the Justices Respect, and June 2027
The Third Circuit is no outlier tribunal. Judge Thomas Hardiman was a finalist for the Supreme Court seat that went to Justice Gorsuch in 2017 and a leading candidate again in 2018, and several members of this majority will plausibly appear on future shortlists. When a court of that stature holds that banning the most popular rifles in America violates the Constitution, the justices notice.
The Supreme Court has already granted certiorari in Viramontes v. County of Cook and Grant v. Higgins, the arms-ban cases it will decide by June 2027. The advocates in those cases can now cite an en banc circuit ruling, authored by a Biden appointee, holding that semi-automatic rifle bans fail Bruen. Brick by brick, precedent by precedent — this is how the arms-ban question arrives at the Supreme Court already won.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.