Case Trends: State Courts Grapple with Gun Rights 

You’re reading our series on 2025 state constitutional trends. All cases are available in our curated State Case Database.

State courts considered an array of questions related to gun rights in 2025. Multiple courts — including in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, and Washington — upheld restrictions on firearms under both state and federal right-to-bear-arms provisions. These courts frequently struggled to interpret the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment decisions and to determine when and how federal case law should apply to state constitutional questions.

Banning Large-Capacity Magazines

The Washington Supreme Court in May upheld a state law banning the selling or manufacturing of large-capacity magazines, which allow a shooter to fire many times without reloading and are often used in mass shootings.

The majority in the 7–2 Washington v. Gator’s Custom Guns decision explained that large-capacity magazines are not “arms” protected under the Second Amendment or the state constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense. Moreover, it wrote, purchasing these products is “not necessary to the core right to possess a firearm in self-defense.”

The case highlighted ongoing difficulties faced by state and federal courts in interpreting and applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions. A trial court originally found that Washington’s ban violated the state constitution, relying on federal jurisprudence. That order came down after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which announced a “history and tradition” test for assessing the legality of arms restrictions and held unconstitutional a New York statute requiring a showing of “special need” for self-defense to obtain certain concealed handgun permits.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024 in United States v. Rahimi held that a person subject to a domestic-violence restraining order could be temporarily disarmed, the Washington Supreme Court re-affirmed its stay of the lower court’s decision, noting that “the trial court also did not have the benefit of” Rahimi, “which further clarified Bruen.”

“I’m confused by our national Second Amendment jurisprudence and I’m confused by Bruen and Rahimi,” Chief Justice Steven González said during oral arguments for Gator’s Custom Guns.

González’s comments resembled those of other judges considering challenges to arms restrictions since Bruen. “I have concerns about how ‘history’ or historiology can become part of a legal analysis,” Ohio Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in 2022 in a gun rights case. And during oral arguments in 2024 in a case challenging a switchblade ban, Massachusetts Justice David Lowy said: “I don’t know what national historic tradition means. . . . Does it matter if folks in Wyoming in 1867 might have had a little different view of whether you needed to have whatever the closest thing to a switchblade was?”

An Independent Interpretation of the Right to Bear Arms

A Kansas intermediate appellate court held in February 2025 that the state constitutional right to “keep and bear arms” should be applied independently of, and not in lockstep with, the Second Amendment.

In 2010, Kansas voters amended the state’s constitution to replace a guarantee of the “right to bear arms” for “defense and security” with explicit protection for the individual “right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, for lawful hunting and recreational use, and for any other lawful purpose.”

In State v. Hall, Mauricio Hall argued that his felon-in-possession conviction violated the state amendment. Applying strict scrutiny, the Kansas Court of Appeals rejected his constitutional arguments and held that a state ban on gun possession by people convicted of certain felonies for a term of years after their release from prison to be narrowly tailored to a compelling interest in ensuring public safety.

In reaching this outcome, the court rejected Bruen’s “history and tradition” test for determining whether laws regulating firearms are constitutional under the Second Amendment. “The substantial gulf in wording” between the Kansas right-to-arms provision and the Second Amendment “cuts strongly against” a lockstep approach, the court said. The purpose of the 2010 amendment, it went on, was “to constitutionalize the rights of gun owners” recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, which held 5–4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a handgun for self-defense. The state amendment, the court held, did not reflect an intent to mirror the subsequent evolution of the federal right post-Heller.

The Bruen test “does not map neatly onto state constitutional law, especially for state right-to-arms protections adopted prior to Bruen,” Andrew Willinger of the Duke Center for Firearms Law wrote. “In challenges to gun laws under state constitutional protections, courts now face uncertainty about both the governing legal test and the relevant universe of historical evidence.”

Age Restrictions on Gun Possession

The Georgia Supreme Court in May unanimously upheld a law banning people younger than 21 from carrying a handgun in public unless they have military training.

In Stephens v. State, 20-year-old Thomas Stephens challenged the law under the Georgia Constitution’s right-to-bear-arms clause, not the Second Amendment. Stephens urged the high court to import into state jurisprudence a strict scrutiny or “history and tradition” test from federal decisions.

In rejecting his claim, the court relied on its longstanding precedent interpreting the state clause, which expressly grants lawmakers “power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne.” Under this clause, the court said, “regulations would not violate the constitutional right to bear arms as long as they were not ‘unreasonable’ or ‘arbitrary’” and did not amount to “‘a denial of the right to bear arms altogether.’” Stephens had failed to make a compelling argument for importing federal tests into state right-to-bear-arms case law, it said, adding that the language giving the legislature authority to regulate arms makes the state clause “notably different” than the Second Amendment.

Waiving the Right to Bear Arms

In State v. Cole, the Iowa Supreme Court held that because Jordan Cole consented to the terms of a protection order that expressly prohibited him from possessing firearms, he had voluntarily waived any right-to-bear-arms claim arising from that order.

The decision represents “a practical path forward for constitutionally disarming individuals subject to domestic violence protection orders after the U.S. Supreme Court’s fractured Second Amendment decision” in Rahimi, professor Eric Ruben recently wrote. “Rahimi upheld firearm prohibitions tied to restraining orders only when a judge finds that the respondent poses a ‘credible threat,’ leaving the many state protection orders that lack such findings in constitutional limbo,” Ruben explained. The Iowa Supreme Court’s decision in Cole “confronted that gap.”

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The majority of right-to-bear-arms cases in the United States are heard in state courts. The decisions above underscore the difficulty these courts face navigating recent federal jurisprudence. “There’s little relief in sight,” Ruben has written, “for state courts struggling to interpret the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment holdings.”

Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot is the managing editor of State Court Report and a senior counsel and manager in the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Chihiro Isozaki is a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Suggested Citation: Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot & Chihiro Isozaki, Case Trends: State Courts Grapple with Gun Rights, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Jan. 27, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/case-trends-state-courts-grapple-gun-rights