A Biden-appointed federal judge wrote the sweeping opinion that dismantled New Jersey's decades-old ban on semiautomatic rifles, and now liberal commentators at Slate warn the ruling hands the Supreme Court a roadmap to protect AR-15 ownership nationwide.
Judge Arianna Freeman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit authored the majority opinion on July 17, 2026, striking down New Jersey's assault-firearms ban and its restrictions on magazines holding more than ten rounds. The Philadelphia-based court ruled 10-5 that the bans violate the Second Amendment, making it the first federal appeals court in the country to invalidate a state-level assault weapons ban. Freeman, appointed by President Biden, applied the Supreme Court's 2022 framework from New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires governments to show that any firearms restriction is consistent with America's historical tradition of gun regulation. New Jersey's ban, in place since 1990, failed that test.
The ruling did not stop at the Colt AR-15, which had been the narrower focus of the lower court. Freeman extended the holding to cover all semiautomatic rifles, finding that the millions of such firearms in circulation prove they are in "common use for lawful purposes" and therefore constitutionally protected.
The Third Circuit's majority, sitting en banc, meaning the full bench heard the case rather than a smaller panel, grounded its analysis in the text-and-history framework the Supreme Court laid out in Bruen and in its earlier 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller. The court found that New Jersey could not identify a sufficient historical tradition justifying its bans. The Third Circuit majority wrote plainly:
"We agree with the District Court that New Jersey's ban on Colt AR-15s violates the Second Amendment. However, because the record supports the same result for all semiautomatic rifles, not only Colt AR-15s, we will modify the District Court's order."
Freeman acknowledged the complexity of the historical record but did not let it save the state's restrictions. She noted that founding-era firearm regulations and mid-to-late-nineteenth-century laws pointed in opposite directions, and concluded that broad bans on commonly owned weapons could not survive constitutional scrutiny.
That a Biden appointee wrote those words is what sent shockwaves through the progressive legal establishment. The ruling was not a 5-5-plus-one squeaker driven by Republican-appointed judges. Multiple Democratic appointees joined the majority. The RealClearPolitics analysis described it as a decision that "scrambled the partisan script," with Obama and Biden appointees lining up alongside their Republican-appointed colleagues.
The Third Circuit's landmark ruling landed like a constitutional fact that gun-control advocates had spent years insisting would never come.
One week after the ruling, Slate columnists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern published a column that read less like legal analysis and more like a concession speech. As Breitbart News reported, Lithwick and Stern did not dispute the legal reasoning so much as lament the political consequences. Their core complaint: Freeman's opinion was too good, too thorough, and too bipartisan for progressives to dismiss.
Lithwick and Stern wrote:
"Although Freeman is very much a liberal judge, this was not a grudging application of Heller and Bruen. She went all-out, enthusiastically applying a maximalist interpretation of Supreme Court precedents. She even expanded the holding beyond Colt AR-15s, which is what the district court had focused on, and applied her judgment to all assault rifles across the board."
The pair then made what they clearly regarded as the most alarming prediction: that the Supreme Court's conservative majority would use Freeman's opinion, written by a liberal judge, to bolster its own forthcoming decisions on assault weapons bans.
Lithwick and Stern continued:
"Basically, I think this decision ultimately gives SCOTUS more cover to rule against assault weapons bans. It creates the false impression of consensus and momentum where it doesn't actually exist."
Set aside the loaded phrase "false impression." What Lithwick and Stern described as a manufactured consensus is, on the record, a 10-5 bipartisan ruling in which judges appointed by presidents of both parties applied the Supreme Court's own precedent and reached the same conclusion. If that is a "false impression," the word "false" has lost its meaning.
Lithwick and Stern also attempted to draw a contrast between the Supreme Court's treatment of gun rights and its treatment of abortion access. They wrote: "...the Supreme Court has told us that access to medication abortion is not a constitutional right. Yet somehow access to assault weapons is a fundamental right?"
The comparison collapses on contact with the text of the Constitution. The Second Amendment explicitly protects the right to keep and bear arms. No comparable textual provision addresses abortion. The Supreme Court said as much in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, when it returned the question of abortion regulation to elected legislatures. Lithwick and Stern may find the distinction inconvenient, but it is not a contradiction, it is the difference between an enumerated right and one the Court previously located in penumbras and emanations.
The broader legal landscape around abortion continues to shift in the courts. The Fifth Circuit recently blocked mail-order abortion pills nationwide, restoring in-person dispensing rules, a decision that itself prompted an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
The case was brought by the National Rifle Association and had been working through the courts since 2018. Justin Davis, the NRA's Managing Director of Public Affairs, called the outcome "monumental." The NRA issued a statement declaring: "Today marks a historic victory for the NRA, the Second Amendment, and law-abiding Americans."
New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport pushed back, arguing that "assault weapons and large capacity magazines play a dangerous role in the modern epidemic of mass shootings, and New Jersey acted reasonably and lawfully in restricting them." But the Third Circuit majority found that argument insufficient under Bruen's historical framework. Policy concerns, however sincere, do not override a constitutional right when the government cannot show a historical tradition supporting the restriction. That is the rule the Supreme Court set in 2022, and the New York Post reported the Third Circuit applied it faithfully.
The Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment rulings have already set off a chain reaction in lower courts, and the Third Circuit decision accelerates that trend.
The Third Circuit ruling does not exist in isolation. The Washington Examiner reported that the Supreme Court is set to hear challenges to similar assault weapons bans from Illinois and Connecticut, with oral arguments expected in December. Those cases could determine whether states may ban commonly owned semiautomatic rifles anywhere in the country.
RealClearPolitics characterized the Third Circuit decision as a preview of the Supreme Court's likely direction. If the justices follow the same Bruen framework, and there is no indication they intend to abandon it, the result in Illinois and Connecticut could mirror what happened in New Jersey. That is precisely what Lithwick and Stern fear, and precisely why they framed Freeman's opinion as dangerous rather than principled.
The ongoing emergency appeals reaching the Supreme Court across multiple policy areas suggest the justices will have no shortage of opportunities to define the boundaries of constitutional rights in the coming term.
Lithwick and Stern's column reveals something progressives rarely say out loud. Their objection is not that Freeman got the law wrong. They conceded she is "very much a liberal judge" who applied Heller and Bruen faithfully, even enthusiastically. Their objection is that the law, as the Supreme Court has defined it, leads to outcomes they do not like.
That is not a legal argument. It is a policy preference dressed in a judge's robe. And when progressives complain that a bipartisan, constitutionally grounded ruling creates a "false impression of consensus," what they mean is that the consensus is real and they wish it were not.
The Second Amendment does not require progressive permission to function. A Biden-appointed judge just proved it.
