Supreme Court to review bans on AR-15s

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to review whether states can ban semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15, setting up a major Second Amendment case.

Short for ArmaLite Rifle, the AR-15’s high-capacity design allows rapid fire, making it especially lethal in mass shootings. Gun advocates, however, call it “America’s rifle,” arguing it is in “common use” by law-abiding citizens and deserves broad Second Amendment protection.

Assault weapons are banned in 10 states, according to Everytown Research, a gun control advocacy group. Last year, the Supreme Court refused to review Maryland’s AR-15 ban, but gun advocates continued to flood the court’s docket with challenges to laws in other states, hoping they would prove more appealing to the justices.

In 2022, NYSRPA v. Bruen reframed gun regulations nationwide, requiring laws to be historically analogous. In the years since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling, the lower courts have increasingly struggled to decide how to measure modern legislation against 18th-century regulations.

In 2024, the justices tried to clarify where to draw that line in Rahimi v. United States, which upheld prohibitions on domestic abusers’ possession of firearms. Then the court took up United States v. Hemani this term to decide whether certain groups who present a special danger of misuse can be barred from gun ownership. Unlike Rahimi’s individualized judicial determination of dangerousness, legal experts said Hemani considers a purely legislative determination about a class of persons.

The justices also reviewed Wolford v. Lopez this term to determine whether states like Hawaii could enact default prohibitions requiring gun owners to receive permission to carry on private property.

In the court’s next term starting in the fall, the high court will review whether prohibitions on AR-15s are constitutional. The justices agreed to look at laws from Illinois and Connecticut.

Cook County, Illinois, banned assault weapons long before a massacre during a Fourth of July parade in 2022 that led to a statewide prohibition on AR-15-style rifles. Instead, the county’s ordinance was inspired by the 1989 Cleveland Park Elementary School shooting.

Cook County first made it illegal to manufacture, buy, sell or possess semiautomatic firearms in 1993, and then again in 2006 after the federal assault weapons ban expired. Decades later, gun owners in the county sued, arguing the ban violates their Second Amendment rights.

In 2022 while the case was being litigated, the Supreme Court decided Bruen, and a gunman fired 83 rounds during Highland Park’s Independence Day celebration, killing seven and wounding 48 in under a minute.

Illinois subsequently enacted a statewide ban on assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition feeding devices, which was challenged in a series of lawsuits that were all turned away by the Supreme Court on numerous occasions.

In one such case, Bevis v. City of Naperville, the Seventh Circuit held that an injunction on a similar ordinance to Cook County’s was inappropriate, citing lacking evidence that assault weapons classified as “arms” under the Second Amendment and the nation’s history and tradition of banning assault weapons.

A lower court then dismissed the gun owners’ claims under Bevis, and the Seventh Circuit refused to overturn its own ruling when the case was reviewed on appeal.

After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Connecticut passed comprehensive gun reform laws making it a crime to own assault weapons. This includes semiautomatic firearms like the AR-15-style rifle that the Sandy Hook gunman used to kill 26 people — the majority of whom were between 6 and 7 years old.

Several Connecticut gun owners and firearm organizations challenged the ban on AR-15s, arguing that restrictions violate the Second Amendment.

One of the underlying cases comes from the National Association for Gun Rights, a controversial gun advocacy group that describes itself as more conservative than the National Rifle Association. The Connecticut Citizens Defense League and the Second Amendment Foundation, also gun rights groups, were behind the other lawsuit.

Connecticut defended its law by arguing that there is a historical precedent for restricting “unusually dangerous” weapons like the AR-15. But the gun advocates said the weapon was hardly “unusual” since it is the most commonly owned semiautomatic firearm in the county.

The Second Circuit rejected the pair of challenges last year, holding Connecticut’s law imposed restrictions on “unusually dangerous weapons” consistent with America’s tradition of gun regulation.

The Supreme Court consolidated both appeals to review whether the bans can stand under the Second and 14th Amendments.

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