Supreme Court agrees to hear gun-rights challenge to AR-15 bans

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will decide whether assault-style weapons can be banned in response to mass shootings, the latest gun-rights dispute the court agreed to hear about the reach of the Second Amendment.

The court said on June 30 that it will hear challenges to bans on AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles in Connecticut and Chicago's Cook County, Illinois.

Connecticut's ban was passed in response to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The court declined, however, to take up a challenge to the federal government’s ban on handgun sales to 18- to 20-year-olds, as well as to a similar state law in Florida.

In deciding its most recent Second Amendment cases, the court this month struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission before bringing a firearm into a store or other private property that’s open to the public. The court also limited the application of a decades-old federal law that bars firearms possession by certain drug users.

The justices have been inundated by gun-rights appeals as the court refines how to apply its landmark 2022 ruling that firearm regulations must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Gun-rights advocates asked the justices to review lower court rulings upholding restrictions.

Gun owners and sellers challenging bans on AR-15s in Illinois and other states counter that “tens of millions of law-abiding Americans have long lawfully owned hundreds of millions of these devices as integral components of constitutionally protected and legal firearms.”

In the Cook County case, gun owners called the AR-15 the “modern descendant of the rifles that were borne by the militiamen of the Revolution and the pioneers who struck out West in search of a better life.”

“The question can be fairly asked, if the Second Amendment does not protect it, what could it possibly protect?” the challengers wrote in their appeal.

Last year, the Supreme Court declined to review Maryland’s ban on assault-style weapons and Rhode Island's ban on high-capacity magazines, although Justice Brett Kavanaugh said his colleagues would need to “address the AR-15 issue soon.”

The Supreme Court is expected to debate the issue in the term that begins in October and hand down a decision by next summer.