The Justice Department sued the state of Colorado Wednesday over a gun control law that has been on the books for more than a decade.The state passed the law, House Bill 13-1224, in 2013, months after a gunman opened fire on a movie theater in Aurora, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. The law formally banned the sale, transfer, and possession of magazines carrying more than 15 rounds of ammunition within state lines.It’s the second such attack this week by the Trump administration on Colorado’s various attempts to curb gun violence. On Tuesday, the DOJ took aim at the city of Denver for a 1989 city law that banned assault weapons.The nation’s premier law office has argued that both laws violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In its complaint, the DOJ claimed that the state’s use of the phrase “large capacity” amounted to “politically charged rhetoric.” The agency further claimed that the phrase “large capacity” was incorrect due to the popularity of semiautomatic guns such as the AR-15, which DOJ attorneys said would make 15 round ammunition “standard capacity.”Mass shootings are a global scourge that only the U.S. has failed to adequately address. Gun violence in America has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent: In the first five months of the year, 145 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 185 victims and injured another 561 people, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.AR-15s are nothing short of civilian-killing machines. As The New Republic’s Colin Dickey noted in his review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner’s 1954 invention “exists to extinguish human lives.”The gun’s popularity within the contemporary American canon comes from an early failure to land its place in the military arsenal that it was designed for, kneecapped by Army bureaucracy that frowned upon a weapon developed out of house.The gun’s subsequent infiltration of the public sphere has made the AR-15 the best-selling rifle in America. It’s estimated that roughly a third of Americans own a gun, according to a 2022 Ipsos poll, while one in 20 U.S. adults are expected to own an AR-15, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos survey that same year.Further still, the modular rifle has become ingrained in the American consciousness by way of mass-casualty events, and is favored by killers who are looking to do as much damage to the human body as possible. At least 10 of the 17 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history involved a gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle.Despite Republican attempts to portray Democratic efforts to curtail the weapon’s availability as an infringement on the lifestyles of blue-collar countrymen, invoking images of farmers and backwoods hunters, the vast majority of AR-15 owners are actually non-rural, with 48 percent living in suburban sprawl and 24 percent living in cities. Additionally, AR-15 owners tend to be some of the wealthier among us, 56 percent having annual incomes in excess of $100,000, according to the Post/Ipsos survey.Over the last decade, gun rights groups have spent more than $141 million on political lobbying, with GOP legislators reaping the bulk of it, according to data from OpenSecrets. Meanwhile, the money behind “gun rights” lobbying groups has dwarfed gun control efforts every year dating back to 1998. By 2024, six of the top 10 congressional recipients who profited the most from gun rights groups were MAGA. Among them was now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who received more than $376,000 from gun rights groups during his time in office. The lobby’s unbroken influence over the political right has swept votes on issues ranging from bans on assault weapons to high-capacity magazines.This story has been updated.