The US supreme court will consider whether bans on AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms are constitutional.
The justices said on Tuesday they will hear appeals challenging bans in Connecticut and the Chicago area in the next term.
The high court’s announcement comes on the heels of two recent victories for second amendment attorneys and advocates. On 18 July the court sided with a Texas man and prospective gun owner who argued that policies that bar marijuana users from ownership violate the second amendment. The following week, the court’s conservative majority struck down a Hawaii law that prohibits people from bringing a gun on to private property without the consent of the property’s owner.
The upcoming cases are the court’s latest steps toward clarifying the doctrine set in place by the 2022 Bruen decision, which requires gun laws to pass a “history and tradition test”, said Hayley Lawrence, the executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke Law School.
“Bruen was this enormous sea change in constitutional interpretation. It bakes in judicial discretion, and supreme court justices don’t like how lower courts are applying the test they created,” she said. “[These cases] are an opportunity to further clarify the metrology and application of the history and tradition test.”
In many states, AR-15s are classified as assault weapons, a legal term used to describe guns that lawmakers determine are meant to be used offensively rather than defensively, based on characteristics like magazine capacity and the size of the weapon.
States like California, New York and Delaware, all have bans on these types of firearms. In 1994, the federal government enacted a national ban but the US congress allowed it to expire in 2004. Democrats have supported renewing it in response to a series of mass shootings. Those efforts have yet to materialize into a new national ban, and states have continued to pass their own laws, including recent measures in Virginia and Rhode Island.
Arguments are expected to be heard in the fall.
The Connecticut law was passed after a mass shooter used an AR-15 to kill 26 children and 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.
“These laws are critical public safety measures, and they are consistent with the second amendment,” said Janet Carter, managing director of second amendment litigation at the gun-control group Everytown Law.
Gun rights groups, on the other hand, argue it is unconstitutional to ban semi-automatic rifles, which are legally owned by millions of Americans.
“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,” said Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation.
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.
“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, the challengers wrote.
The ban in Cook county, Illinois, was first passed in 1993. Lower courts have upheld both laws. In 2021, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed the initial second amendment challenge against the ban that the supreme court is expected to hear later this year. On Tuesday, the group celebrated the court’s decision to grant cert in Viramontes v Cook County, Illinois.
“For years, the FPC Grassroots Army has fought hard to bring this question to the Supreme Court, and now the time has come to march forward and reclaim the rights that were immorally taken from us,” the group said in a statement.
Attorneys for Cook county, on the other hand, say the measure does pass constitutional muster. “The trauma that assault weapon massacres have inflicted on the public at large has been staggering,” they wrote.
The court passed on hearing another second amendment case that focused on restrictions on gun sales to people between the ages of 18 and 20.
