The Washington state-based Second Amendment Foundation has smacked state Attorney General Bob Ferguson for repeatedly claiming every court across the country has “either rejected or overturned” legal challenges to bans on so-called “large-capacity magazines.”
Ferguson’s most recent remarks came after a Cowlitz County Superior Court judge declared the Evergreen State’s magazine ban unconstitutional under both the federal and state constitutions. Judge Gary Bashor’s 55-page ruling was issued earlier this week, and Ferguson’s office scrambled to get a request to the State Supreme Court for a stay, which he got just 88 minutes after Bashor’s ruling was released.
SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb released a statement in which he noted, “A federal court in California declared that state’s magazine ban to be unconstitutional. That ruling was stayed, and the order has been appealed to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, but it has yet to be overruled. Washington is in the 9th Circuit.”
Ferguson was also one of 18 attorneys general whose amicus brief to the Third U.S. Court of Appeals in a SAF case challenging discriminatory gun laws in Pennsylvania was on the losing side in an attempt for an en banc rehearing before the court.
Likewise, he added, Oregon Measure 114—an extremist gun control law passed by voters two years ago, which contained a magazine ban—was also declared unconstitutional by a circuit court judge. That ruling has been appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court, but Gottlieb said the judge’s decision has also not been overruled.
Taking the criticism to another level, Gottlieb said Ferguson should be challenged by local media whenever he claims that magazine bans, or other gun control laws adopted in Washington state in recent years, “save lives.”
“How can he say that” Gottlieb questioned. “The most recent report from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs shows the number of murders statewide went up in 2022, the year the ban law was signed, by 16.6 percent. There were 394 murders in the state that year, while 2021 saw 338 homicides.”
Since the first of two billionaire-backed gun control initiatives was passed in 2014, the number of murders in Washington has doubled. Ferguson has backed all of those gun control efforts, and Gottlieb suggested the local media “should call him on it.”
