The fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rollback of gun safety regulations continued through Colorado on Tuesday, as a federal judge temporarily blocked Boulder County from enforcing its prohibitions on large-capacity magazines and “assault weapons.”

U.S. District Court Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against a county ordinance that forbids the sale, purchase or transfer of gun magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, plus semiautomatic firearms the county has deemed assault weapons. Sweeney agreed to intervene in the barely two-week-old case because the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged Boulder County’s regulations infringe upon their Second Amendment rights.

“On this admittedly limited record and with a liberal analysis of this factor, the Court finds that Plaintiffs establish a substantial likelihood of success on the merits,” she wrote in granting the temporary restraining order.

Currently, there are three other cases pending against Boulder County municipalities for their similar gun safety regulations, plus two lawsuits challenging the state’s 2013 ban on large-capacity magazines. The wave of litigation is the product of the Supreme Court’s June ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, in which the conservative-majority court imposed a more demanding standard for gun regulations to pass constitutional muster.

“Under the old approach, courts weighed the government’s justifications for a law against the burden it imposed and considered how well the law was tailored to its goals — which included weighing empirical evidence about whether the law was effective,” said Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law at Duke University.

But the Bruen decision decreed that gun safety restrictions are now acceptable only when they are “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Bruen and the legal challenges it has emboldened are frustrating to some Boulder County officials, who see assault weapons themselves as being inconsistent with much of American history.

“You look back to when our Constitution was written, none of these kinds of weapons were envisioned by the Founders. And these high-capacity magazines — none of this stuff existed,” said Rep. Judy Amabile, D-Boulder. “I don’t think there’s many people in Boulder County who are clamoring for more assault weapons.”

On the other side, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the pro-gun group behind several of the cases filed, celebrated its newfound tool for striking down legislative attempts at curbing gun violence.

“We are on fire, we just can’t stop winning in the courts,” said Taylor Rhodes, the group’s executive director, in a statement on Tuesday. “The floodgates are open and we are taking back the rights that evil tyrants stole from us.”

The laws and ordinances under scrutiny were each enacted in the wake of some of Colorado’s worst mass murders. After a man killed 12 people in an Aurora movie theater in 2012, the state legislature banned gun magazines that hold in excess of 15 rounds of ammunition. Following the massacre of 10 more people at a grocery store in Boulder, the General Assembly last year granted local governments the power to pass their own gun safety regulations.

In response, Boulder County and several of its municipalities exercised their new authority to enact similar prohibitions on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. But the consequence of Colorado joining the minority of states that allow for local control of firearm regulations means the Bruen decision has placed a target on the county’s efforts.

“There are just more laws on the books to challenge in Colorado because local governments can regulate guns in ways that are not possible in other states,” said Willinger. The fate of those laws, he added, will likely depend upon whether judges believe there needs to be a highly-similar historical regulation that can justify the modern restrictions.

Already, U.S. District Court Judge Raymond P. Moore has temporarily blocked the town of Superior’s regulations, with a hearing scheduled for early November on whether to enjoin the town’s ordinance for the remainder of the litigation. Sweeney has set a conference for the parties in the Boulder County lawsuit for Sept. 8. The judges in two other lawsuits against the cities of Boulder and Louisville have not yet acted on requests for temporary restraining orders. 

However, in a court filing on Tuesday, each of the local governments agreed they would halt enforcement of their respective regulations in the near term if the cases were combined. 

“It would be inefficient and a waste of the resources of the Court and the Parties in all four cases to proceed on separate litigation tracks,” wrote Antonio J. Perez-Marques, an attorney for Superior. “Moreover, consolidation would avoid the inherent risk of inconsistent judgments that would be raised by the separate treatment of four nearly identical cases.”

Meanwhile, the two lawsuits proceeding against Colorado for the statewide ban on large-capacity magazines have not yet changed the status quo. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Philip A. Brimmer last week declined to block the law after determining a self-represented plaintiff from Colorado Springs had mistakenly sued the attorney general, who lacks enforcement authority over the magazine ban. U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang, who is handling the other lawsuit, has set a preliminary injunction hearing for November.

A spokesperson for Boulder County told Colorado Politics the jurisdiction plans to present evidence its gun safety ordinance is “constitutionally sound.” Amabile, the state representative in whose district the supermarket massacre occurred, pointed out the United States has banned assault weapons before. Based on the current proliferation of such weaponry, she hopes the courts will not invalidate the current set of prohibitions.

“I think that will be terrible for our country and will perpetuate this cycle of violence that we are seeing,” she said. “We absolutely have to have the ability to rein that in in ways that are common sense. I also think the people are with us on this.”