The Supreme Court will consider whether AR-15 rifles are legal under the Second Amendment.
The justices will hear cases challenging local and state laws banning AR-15s and semiautomatic rifles. One case involves a policy in Cook County, Illinois, while another focuses on Connecticut law.
The Illinois case was brought by Cutberto Viramontes, who argued that the policy violates his Second Amendment right. Lower courts upheld the law. He then went to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Court should “address the confusion in the lower courts over how to apply this Court’s precedent in arms bans cases—precedent that is straightforward but that the lower courts have proven incapable of applying correctly.”
Challengers to the Connecticut law argued that “a firearm cannot be banned if it is in common use for lawful purposes. If the most popular rifle in the country is not in common use, it is hard to see what that phrase could possibly mean.”
Last year, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case on the constitutionality of AR-15s. While Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch voted to hear the case at the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the Court will hear the case “in the next Term or two.”
In a written statement on the case, Kavanaugh said, “Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decisionmaking on the AR–15 issue.” He noted, “Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”
Thomas declared that AR-15s are “clearly ‘Arms’ Under the Second Amendment’s plain text.”
“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” he asserted. “That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR–15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”
