A split Supreme Court turned down a challenge to a state ban on assault weapons. Semiautomatic rifles, popular among gun owners, have also played a significant role in mass shootings.
The majority didn’t say why they turned down the case about guns like the AR-15. Three of the nine justices on the court, all of whom are conservative, openly disagreed, while a fourth said he wasn’t sure if such restrictions are constitutional.
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have looked at the case, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say that the law clearly violates the Second Amendment.
Thomas wrote, “I wouldn’t wait to decide if the government can ban the most popular rifle in America.” “That question is very important to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners across the country.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump appointed, agreed with the decision to throw out the case now, but he doesn’t think that such bans are constitutional and anticipates that the court will look at the issue “in the next term or two.”
The Maryland law was passed after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2012, which killed 20 children and six adults. The shooter had an AR-15, which is a type of rifle that is also called an assault weapon.
Several states have laws that are similar, and Democrats in Congress have also supported the idea. The challengers said that people had a constitutional right to buy rifles like the AR-15, which most gun owners do legally.
The lawsuit comes as the Supreme Court is currently hearing another case that could have a huge impact on the Second Amendment.
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of United States v. Hemani. This case questions whether a federal law that makes it a crime for an illegal drug user to own a gun is constitutional.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Hemani’s case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit threw out his conviction last year because the law, as it applied to Hemani, who admitted to using marijuana a lot, violated the Second Amendment.
Hemani is the first case since the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen that has prompted the court to consider whether it is constitutional to arrest people for owning guns solely based on their membership in a certain group.
The court decided in 2024 that the defendant in United States v. Rahimi was dangerous because his ex-girlfriend had made accusations against him.
But in Hemani, the law says that anyone who uses drugs illegally can’t have a gun, no matter what their situation is. The main question seems to be: Can the government ban all illegal drug users from owning guns?
How does this categorical frame fit with the Bruen test, which says that every modern gun law must be based on a similar law from the time of the founding (or close to it)?
While the nation awaits the ruling, it appears that both the conservative and liberal justices were against the law’s broad definition of the category.
The justices appeared to concur that the law could charge and disarm an excessive number of individuals for unwarranted offenses.
Both sides were against the category’s size and kept saying they didn’t believe a law could cover so many things.
It seemed like too much to ask to take away the guns of all illegal drug users, from marijuana smokers to PCP users to people who used their spouse’s prescription drugs.
A majority of the justices seemed to agree that a lot of illegal drug users were just too dangerous to have guns.
But after the argument on Monday morning, it was clear that both the left and right sides of the court did not agree that all illegal drug users, no matter what their situation was, lost their Second Amendment rights.
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