By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to the legality of state restrictions on assault-style rifles and large-capacity ammunition magazines, passing up for now cases that offered the justices a chance to further expand gun rights.
The justices turned away two appeals after lower courts upheld a ban in Maryland on powerful semi-automatic rifles such as AR-15s and one in Rhode Island restricting the possession of ammunition feeding devices holding more than 10 rounds. The lower courts rejected arguments that the measures violate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”
Three conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the cases.
A fourth, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a statement accompanying the Maryland case expressed sympathy for the argument made by the challengers that semiautomatic AR-15s are in common use by “law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment.” Kavanaugh said the issue will return to the Supreme Court, which “presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon.”
In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence including numerous mass shootings, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, often has taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment.
The court broadened gun rights in landmark rulings in 2008, 2010 and in a 2022 case that made it harder to defend gun restrictions under the Second Amendment, requiring them to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The challengers in the two cases turned away on Monday by the Supreme Court contended that states and courts are flouting precedents that make clear that the Second Amendment protects weapons that are in “common use.”
Maryland in 2013 enacted its ban on military-style “assault weapons” such as the AR-15 and AK-47 after a shooter used such a firearm in the 2012 mass killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The law carries a penalty of up to three years in prison.
A Maryland resident who is seeking to purchase one of the banned guns, as well as three gun rights organizations including the Firearms Policy Coalition, sued in 2020, claiming the ban violates the Second Amendment.
The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 rejected the challenge because it said assault weapons “are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense.” As such, the “excessively dangerous” firearms are not protected by the Second Amendment, the 4th Circuit decided.
The 4th Circuit said it refused “to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes.”
The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that the term “assault weapon” is a political term that is designed to exploit public confusion over machine guns and semi-automatic firearms. The banned weapons, they said, are “identical to any other semiautomatic firearm – arms that are exceedingly common and fully protected by the Second Amendment.”
Rhode Island’s law, passed in 2022 as a response to mass shootings, bars most “large-capacity feeding” devices such as a magazine or drum that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
The state calls it a “mild restriction on a particularly dangerous weapons accessory” and that in mass shooting situations, “any pause in fire, such as the pause to switch magazines, allows for precious seconds in which to escape or take defensive action.” The law applied retroactively, meaning residents had to surrender or alter any banned magazine that they owned, and carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.
Four gun owners and a registered firearms dealer sued, claiming the ban violated their Second Amendment rights, and that having to forfeit the magazines they owned violated the Constitution’s prohibition on the government taking property without compensation.
In 2024 the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims and refused to block the law.
The Rhode Island plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that instead of abiding by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling, the state’s law “can only be understood as protest legislation imposing more restrictive bans on long-common arms.”
The Supreme Court has been buffeted in recent years by challenges to gun restrictions. On March 26, the court upheld a regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration. The court last year struck down a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
Comments