This will be interesting to watch:

A group of retired police officers and four San Francisco residents sued the city in federal court Tuesday to challenge a new law banning high-capacity ammunition magazines.

The lawsuit, sponsored by the National Rifle Association, claims the measure violates the constitutional Second Amendment right to bear arms.

“Limiting magazine capacity for law-abiding citizens to 10 rounds decreases public safety by giving violent criminals an advantage and thus decreasing the likelihood a victim will survive a criminal attack,” the suit contends.

In Heller, the court applied a ” in common use for lawful purposes” standard drawn from Miller, that suggests that while some arms may be banned, it is not as easy to ban arms in common use by law-abiding citizens. A majority of today’s staggered-column magazine pistols and rifles feature standard capacity magazines that exceed the arbitrary 10-round limits established by politicians, so will be interesting to see what argument the state makes in an attempt to justify their definition of “high capacity” when a ten-round limit is indeed a completely arbitrary figure.

I suspect it will be relatively easy for the plaintiffs to argue for true-standard capacity magazines (10-20 rounds in various handguns, 20-30-40-round magazines for many rifles). Whether the plaintiffs will attempt to claim magazine capacity limits in general are unconstitutional, I simply don’t know.

If the San Francisco ban is struck down, it will likely signal a similar fate for nearby Sunnyvale and other California cities with similarly-worded bans.

Purely as a practical matter, magazine bans are expected to have little to no affect on violent crime, and only criminalizes what what previously a benign and legal act of ownership.