A federal judge has temporarily blocked a Colorado town from enforcing parts of a new gun control ordinance, including a ban on the sale and possession of assault weapons, after it was challenged by gun rights groups.
U.S. District Court Judge Raymond Moore issued a temporary restraining order on Friday against Superior, noting that the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the National Association for Gun Rights and a Superior resident, Charles Bradley Walker, had established a likelihood to prove their case in challenging two sections of the ordinance. Moore scheduled an Aug. 4 hearing to determine whether to continue to keep Superior from enforcing those sections.
The other section requires people who already had assault weapons before the law took effect on July 1 to get a permit to continue to possess them but largely only on their own property. The law defines assault weapons as a number of different semi-automatic weapons.
Moore’s ruling included several references to last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a New York law that had required people to show why they needed a concealed weapons permit. He noted that the court found that Americans have the right to bear commonly used arms in public, subject to reasonable and well-defined restrictions, and that governments must identify “an American tradition” to justify any limits on their use.