The Supreme Court will hear appeals challenging bans on the AR-15 and similar semiautomatic firearms in Connecticut and the Chicago area, putting more power over public life back in the hands of nine justices who have already expanded gun rights and reshaped the rules around firearms.
The court said Tuesday it will take up whether bans on semiautomatic rifles, often called assault weapons, violate the Second Amendment. Arguments are expected in the fall. The decision lands in a country where similar laws exist in about a dozen states, covering major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while Congress let a national assault weapons ban expire in 2004. That federal retreat left states to patch together their own restrictions, and Democrats have supported renewing the ban in response to a series of mass shootings.
Who Gets to Decide
The justices are stepping into another high-profile dispute over firearms after a 2022 ruling expanded Second Amendment rights and spawned challenges to firearm laws around the country. This term, the court backed Second Amendment rights in two cases, striking down gun carry restrictions in Hawaii and a broad federal ban on gun ownership by marijuana users. It has previously upheld some restrictions, including a law barring people under domestic-violence restraining orders from having guns.
Four conservative justices on the nine-member court, enough to grant review of a case, had signaled that it was only a matter of time before the court took up the issue. Lower courts have upheld both the Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois, laws. The Cook County ban was first passed in 1993. The machinery of constitutional review now sits above local and state governments, deciding which limits survive and which ones get swept aside.
Who Pays for the Fight
The Connecticut law was passed after a mass shooter used an AR-15 to kill 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. The state says the guns are a preferred weapon of mass shooters, and they can be banned because they are similar to military-grade weapons. Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment litigation at the gun-control group Everytown Law, said, “These laws are critical public safety measures, and they are consistent with the Second Amendment.”
Gun rights groups argue it’s unconstitutional to ban semiautomatic rifles, which are legally owned by millions of Americans. Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, said, “The Second Amendment protects arms in common use for lawful purposes, and it’s hard to argue that a type of rifle that potentially outnumbers Ford F-150 trucks in America doesn’t meet that standard.” The legal fight turns on whose version of safety and rights the court will bless, while the people living with the consequences stay stuck under decisions made far above them.
What the System Calls Public Safety
Challengers wrote, “If the Second Amendment does not protect the most popular rifles in the country, it is hard to see how it protects any firearms at all,” aside from handguns kept in the home. Attorneys for Cook County said the measure does pass constitutional muster. “The trauma that assault weapon massacres have inflicted on the public at large has been staggering,” they wrote.
Also Tuesday, the court rebuffed a series of cases over restrictions on guns for young adults under age 21, declining to hear an issue that’s sharply divided lower courts in recent years. The justices keep choosing which fights matter and which ones don’t, while the rest of the country lives with the fallout from laws, bans, and the violence that keeps feeding the next round of courtroom theater.