Columbus Magazine Ban Stays Blocked After Ohio Appeal

Last updated October 2026 · By Nick Hall, tracks federal and state firearms policy daily for USA Gun Shop readers

Quick take: An Ohio appeals court has kept the Columbus ban on 30-round magazines blocked. The three-judge panel upheld a 2023 preliminary injunction on October 9, 2026, and nobody dissented. It’s a win at the injunction stage, and the lawsuit itself is not over.

• Ruling: On October 9, 2026 the court affirmed the preliminary injunction that stops Columbus from enforcing its ban on magazines holding 30 or more rounds, in Doe v. Columbus, 2026-Ohio-3991.
• Court: The Ohio Court of Appeals for the Fifth Appellate District, with Presiding Judge William B. Hoffman writing and Judges Craig R. Baldwin and Robert G. Montgomery concurring.
• Why it matters: The gun owners brought no Second Amendment claim, and the court found them likely to win under the state preemption statute and Article I, Section 4 of the Ohio Constitution.
• What’s next: Columbus has 45 days from the judgment to ask the Supreme Court of Ohio to take the case, and the lawsuit in Delaware County has not reached a final judgment.

Most magazine ban fights in the news are Second Amendment cases in federal court, like the Seventh Circuit decision that upheld the Illinois ban. This one is different. A state court, a state constitution and a state preemption statute. I read all 76 paragraphs, and here is what is in them.

Table of Contents

What the Fifth District Decided in Doe v. Columbus

The decision is Doe v. Columbus, 2026-Ohio-3991, Case No. 23 CAE 04 0028 in the Ohio Court of Appeals, Fifth Appellate District. The caption gives the result in two words, “Judgment: Affirmed,” and dates the judgment entry October 9, 2026.

Presiding Judge William Hoffman wrote it, and Judges Craig Baldwin and Robert Montgomery concurred. No dissent, no separate concurrence: 3-0.

What they affirmed is an April 25, 2023 order from Judge David Gormley of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas. That order granted a preliminary injunction to six anonymous Columbus gun owners and barred the city from enforcing the ban while the case is heard.

Columbus raised five assignments of error, and the panel overruled all five. The opinion ends on two short lines: “The judgment of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas is affirmed.” Then: “Costs to Appellants.”

The Columbus Magazine Ban, in the Courts’ Own Words

On December 5, 2022, Columbus City Council passed Ordinance 3176-2022 to, in words the appeals opinion puts in quotation marks, “effectuate common sense gun reform.” It bars carrying or possessing what the city calls large-capacity magazines.

The appeals opinion never states the number. The Supreme Court of Ohio did, in its April 1, 2026 opinion in the same case. The city code defines a large capacity magazine as one with the capacity to accept “thirty (30) or more rounds of ammunition for use in a firearm.”

So a standard 30-round AR-15 magazine is covered. The penalties are criminal, “including a mandatory jail term,” the Fifth District wrote, and Judge Gormley’s order describes them as misdemeanor penalties. The same ordinance created a negligent storage offense for a firearm kept at home where the owner knows or should know a minor can get to it.

Five residents sued on February 16, 2023, as John Does 1 through 4 and Jane Doe. A sixth, John Doe 5, joined in an amended complaint on March 10. They are represented by The Buckeye Institute.

Eleven days after the suit landed, on February 27, 2023, the council passed a second ordinance, 0680-2023. It gave immunity from prosecution until July 1, 2023 to people who lawfully had the magazines before December 5, 2022.

The injunction arrived before July 1 did. “For now, no one faces prosecution under the city’s ordinance,” Judge Gormley wrote on April 25, 2023.

Why R.C. 9.68 and Article I, Section 4 Carried It

The legal basis is easy to get wrong, so here it is exactly. The plaintiffs sued under two pieces of Ohio law: R.C. 9.68, the state firearms preemption statute, and Article I, Section 4 of the Ohio Constitution. The opinion notes they “did not raise a claim challenging the Ordinance in light of the Second Amendment.”

The city argued the trial judge had wrongly viewed a state claim through the “lens of the Second Amendment” and should have applied the reasonableness test from Arnold v. Cleveland, a 1993 Supreme Court of Ohio decision. The panel’s answer: “We disagree.”

Its reasoning is that the federal Constitution sets a floor. The trial judge said he had to read the Ohio provision “in a way that protects the individual right to bear arms at least as much as the U.S. Supreme Court would protect that right under the Second Amendment.” The panel wrote: “We agree with the trial court.” It also noted that Arnold dates from 1993, years before Heller, McDonald, Bruen and Rahimi.

Measured against that floor, Judge Gormley had reviewed federal decisions on magazine limits and “identified no longstanding historical analog to the type of restriction that Columbus has imposed.” He concluded the city would “probably not be able to demonstrate that its magazine-capacity restriction is consistent with the country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The Fifth District found no error in analyzing the state claim that way.

Then the statute. R.C. 9.68 says the state “preempts, supersedes, and declares null and void” local firearm restrictions that go beyond state and federal law. Columbus argued that a Franklin County court “has already preliminary ruled that R.C. 9.68 violates the City’s home rule authority.”

The panel answered with two Supreme Court of Ohio decisions, Cleveland v. State from 2010 and Cincinnati v. State from 2024. Its conclusion: “Because R.C. 9.68 is constitutional, we find Appellees are likely to prevail on their statutory claims.”

So the court relied on both Ohio grounds, the preemption statute and the state constitution’s right to bear arms, and it used the Second Amendment only as the minimum level of protection that the Ohio provision has to match, which is a different thing from deciding a Second Amendment claim that nobody filed.

The Procedural Fights Columbus Also Lost

Three of the city’s five arguments had nothing to do with magazines.

First, the pseudonyms. The trial judge had found the plaintiffs’ fear of prosecution “does appear to be objectively reasonable,” since the city wanted to enforce the ban through criminal penalties. The panel wrote, “We agree with the trial court’s rationale.”

Second, the city called this “the third case filed” on the same question, after earlier cases in Franklin County and Fairfield County, and said those courts had priority. The panel held that those actions “do not involve substantially the same parties.” Judge Gormley’s order explains why: the only parties in them are the City of Columbus and the State of Ohio.

Third, standing. Five of the six plaintiffs said they had the regulated magazines inside Columbus. That gave them what the court called “such a personal stake in the outcome.”

What the Columbus Ruling Doesn’t Settle

But this is a preliminary injunction. Not a final judgment. The question on appeal was whether the plaintiffs are likely to win, and nobody has won the case yet.

Judge Gormley’s order says the injunction stays in effect “until it is dissolved or modified by me or until this case is resolved on the merits.” He also wrote, “I will certainly keep an open mind as the record expands.”

It took this long because of a detour. The Fifth District first dismissed the city’s appeal on November 29, 2023, for lack of a final, appealable order. The Supreme Court of Ohio reversed on April 1, 2026, with five justices in the majority and two dissenting, holding that a city may immediately appeal an order that preliminarily enjoins its laws. The Fifth District reopened the case on May 26 and heard argument on August 4.

Who is bound? The City of Columbus, its officers, agents and employees, and the individual defendants, who are “enjoined, until further order of the court, from enforcing” a list of code sections. The list includes the magazine sections and the negligent storage section.

It is a Columbus ordinance, so nothing here changes the law anywhere else. Judge Gormley wrote that state law “appears to impose no regulations at all” on the size of firearm magazines, which fits the preemption picture on our Ohio gun laws page. States that do cap capacity are on our list of magazine capacity laws by state.

A few things are left untouched. The plaintiffs also claimed the ordinance’s original wording was void for vagueness. Judge Gormley thought that claim unlikely to succeed, and the appeals opinion does not rule on it.

There is no trial date in the opinion either. A trial on a permanent injunction had been set for October 22, 2024, according to Justice Jennifer Brunner’s dissent in the April ruling, and the appeal outlasted it.

What comes next is the city’s call. Under the Supreme Court of Ohio’s Rules of Practice, a notice of appeal is due “within forty-five days from the entry of the judgment being appealed.” Counting from October 9, that is November 23, 2026, and a timely request for reconsideration in the Fifth District would restart the clock.

If Columbus files, the justices decide whether to take up the merits they did not reach in April. If it doesn’t, the case goes on in Delaware County with the ban still blocked.

Blocked in April 2023. Still blocked in October 2026. The city’s best result so far is the right to lose this appeal sooner.

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