The Trump administration on Wednesday sued Colorado over a state law prohibiting a gun magazine that can hold more than 15 rounds of ammunition.

It’s the second lawsuit filed by the administration in two days targeting gun statutes in Colorado. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice also sued the city of Denver over its ban on “assault weapons.”

Lawmakers passed the magazine ban in 2013 in the wake of the Aurora theater assault that left 12 people dead and more than 70 wounded the year before. The law’s backers noted that one of suspect’s weapons was a semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round drum magazine.

In the years hence, the Democratic-controlled legislature has adopted a staccato of gun restrictions, notably allowing a judge to temporarily take someone’s gun away under Colorado’s “red flag” law.

Democrats have argued that the restrictions are necessary to curb mass shootings and they promote safety.

Critics, on the other hand, have countered that the new laws only make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to access guns and defend themselves, giving criminals the advantage. They also said gun restrictions have not stopped mass shootings in Colorado.

In its latest lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice said the state law violates citizens’ Second Amendment rights because it prohibits access to the detachable magazine that is commonly used. The agency said the number of such banned magazines in Colorado number in the tens of millions.

The core of the federal government’s argument is that Colorado’s ban is illegal under Bruen, a landmark case that struck down New York’s requirement that individuals obtain an unrestricted license to carry a concealed firearm because it prevented law-abiding citizens with “ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment.”

The DOJ said, under Bruen, a law that restricts conduct by the plain text of the Second Amendment is presumed to be unconstitutional. Such is the case with the Colorado law, the agency said.

The state law, the agency added, “uses politically charged rhetoric to describe the arms it bans.”

“The Magazine Ban’s characterization of these magazines as ‘large capacity’ is a misnomer, because magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds are, in fact, standard capacity magazines for many popular firearms, including the AR-15 rifle, the most popular rifle in America,” the lawsuit said.

In a statement, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division characterized the state ban as “political virtue signaling at the expense of Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser vowed to defend what he called “Colorado’s common-sense gun safety law.”

“Using federal civil rights law to put Coloradans at greater risk of gun violence is a dangerous overreach by the Justice Department and this lawsuit turns the mission of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division on its head,” Weiser said in a news release.

Weiser argued that bans on “large-capacity magazines satisfy Second Amendment protections while reducing casualties in mass shootings.”

“The state has a duty to protect Colorado residents from gun violence, and I will vigorously defend our state large-capacity magazine limit law from this attack by the Trump Justice Department,” Weiser added.  

The ban was enacted in 2013 under the state’s Democrat-controlled House and Senate. Then-Gov. John Hickenlooper, now one of Colorado’s U.S. senators, signed it into law.

The political and legal fallout came swiftly. Gun rights supporters recalled two legislators and another resigned. State sheriffs also unsuccessfully sued to block the law. 

Magpul Industries, one of the country’s largest producers of ammunition magazines, left Colorado in protest, moving its production, distribution and shipping operations to Cheyenne and its headquarters to Texas.

On Tuesday, the DOJ separately filed a suit in federal court alleging that Denver’s longstanding prohibition on “assault-style” weapons unconstitutionally bans certain constitutionally protected semi-automatic rifles and infringes on the “Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms in common use for lawful purposes.”

Passed in 1989, Denver’s ban on “assault-style” weapons similarly restricts the possession and sale of guns with magazines carrying more than 15 rounds.

The DOJ argued that Denver’s ordinance “uses politically charged rhetoric,” and that the term “assault weapon” is “a political term developed by anti-gun publicists to expand the category of assault rifles to allow an attack on as many additional firearms as possible.”

The Trump administration has moved to broadly challenge gun regulations, arguing it is “ending the weaponization of federal authority against law-abiding gun owners.”

The department last month announced a plan to undo certain gun restrictions, saying its proposed changes would “reduce unnecessary burdens on law-abiding citizens and businesses while modernizing regulatory frameworks that no longer reflect current law, agency practice, or court precedent.”

In announcing the lawsuit against Denver, Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said that “law-abiding Americans, regardless of what city or state they reside in, should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction just for exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms which are owned by tens of millions of their fellow citizens.”

Denver City Attorney Miko Brown, who responded to the DOJ in a letter sent Monday, said the city will “vigorously defend its ordinance if challenged.”

“This ordinance is not unconstitutional, no question about it,” Brown said, noting that the almost four-decade-old law has been tested and upheld in six different courts of appeal.

“These are not assault weapons that are in common use and regularly used for self-defense,” Brown added. “So, we feel really confident that if we are challenged, we will prevail.”

Reporters Deborah Grigsby contributed to this article, which also used previous reporting by Joey Bunch of Colorado Politics.