Nearly two years after a collection of firearm owners and gun rights groups sued Boulder County and three of its municipalities over their respective ordinances, a federal judge on Monday signaled she was prepared to dismiss the lawsuit due to a lack of standing.

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the National Association for Gun Rights and five individual Coloradans filed suit in 2022 over local firearms ordinances that generally prohibited the sale, transfer and possession of large-capacity magazines and semi-automatic guns deemed “assault weapons,” with some variation. The plaintiffs based their challenge on a then-new U.S. Supreme Court decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, in which the court’s conservative majority made it more difficult for gun restrictions to pass constitutional muster. 

The parties submitted nearly 1,900 pages of material seeking to end the case in their favor without a trial, arguing why the ordinances did or did not meet Bruen‘s Second Amendment test. But U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang stopped short of that question, instead finding the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate why the ordinances injured them in the first place.

“For instance, there are no factual allegations regarding what types of firearms and/or magazines each of the Individual Plaintiffs possesses; or what features the firearms and/or magazines have; or how long the Individual Plaintiffs have possessed them; or when each of the Individual Plaintiffs came into possession of them,” she wrote in a Sept. 30 order.

Although the defendants — Boulder County and the municipalities of Superior, Louisville and Boulder — disputed in passing whether the plaintiffs had standing, they had not specifically raised the issue as a reason for Wang to grant judgment for them.

Due to the technical quirk, Wang gave the plaintiffs until Oct. 15 to explain why she should not side with the local governments and end the case.

The Supreme Court’s Bruen decision prompted an onslaught of challenges to gun laws in civil and criminal cases, owing to a new legal framework for analyzing the constitutionality of firearm regulations.

The government, when defending a gun law, “must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas for the court’s majority.

The Boulder County governments enacted their regulations in the wake of a mass murder at a Boulder King Soopers. A jury convicted the perpetrator last month and he is now serving life in prison.

In their challenge, however, the plaintiffs argued the localities could not justify the laws with a Founding-era ban that resembled their own.

“None of these historical limitations on methods of using or carrying arms remotely approaches Defendants’ complete ban on mere possession of common arms even within the confines of one’s home for the purpose of self-defense,” wrote the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

“Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment right does not protect their possession of weapons of war, much less accessories that make such weapons even more efficient killing machines,” countered the governments’ lawyers. “And it does not render lawmakers powerless to address the dramatic changes in firearms technology since our nation’s founding, or the tragic and unprecedented societal ill of mass shootings.”

Wang, an appointee of President Joe Biden, did not engage with the parties’ analysis. She focused instead on the set of largely identical statements the plaintiffs submitted asserting they currently possess assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, would like to acquire more in the future, but would be prohibited by the ordinances.

Wang found that, problematically, the plaintiffs had given no details about what items they own, making it impossible for her to determine whether their unspecified guns actually fell under the prohibitions of the ordinances. She believed the plaintiffs’ stated intent to acquire banned items was similarly vague.

“Indeed, there is no guarantee that the Ordinances will still be in effect as written at the time of any future purchase, or that any of the Individual Plaintiffs will reside in one of the Municipalities or unincorporated Boulder County at that time,” Wang wrote, “or that a particular Plaintiff will not be exempt from the applicable Ordinance at the time of possession or transfer.”

Wang added that if the plaintiffs offer a sufficient justification for why the government defendants should not prevail, she will move forward and decide the merits of the constitutional challenge.

The case is Rocky Mountain Gun Owners et al. v. The Town of Superior et al.