Supreme Court to Decide Fate of State and Local Gun Bans in Major Second Amendment Showdown

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it will consider whether states and local governments can ban semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15.

The court will review two challenges of bans in Cook County, Illinois, and the state of Connecticut in its next session, which begins in October.

Doug Hamlin, CEO of the National Rifle Association, supported the high court taking the cases.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to review the unconstitutional bans of common semiautomatic firearms represents a critical step toward restoring the full scope of the Second Amendment as our Founders intended,” Hamlin said in a public statement. He added the NRA Institute for Legislative Action would oppose similar proposals.

“Americans have a fundamental right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes—including the most popular rifles in the country, which law-abiding citizens own by the tens of millions for self-defense, community defense, sporting use, and the defense of liberty,” Hamlin continued.

In the case of Viramontes v. Cook County, the plaintiff Cutberto Viramontes sued in 2021 over the county’s ban on AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic rifles. The lower court and 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, according to SCOTUSblog. The courts held that Supreme Court precedent would allow regulation of certain weapons, citing the Heller and Bruen rulings.

Viramontes argues the Supreme Court should “guarantee fundamental Second Amendment rights and … 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.”

Cook County’s ban extends to “over 100 specific rifles” including “many perfectly ordinary and common firearms, like the AR-15 rifle,” according to Viramontes’ petition for the court to hear the case.

The ban includes “any semiautomatic rifle with the ability to accept a magazine holding more than ten rounds of ammunition” if the firearm has features such as a pistol grip without a stock attached, a folding or telescoping stock, or a muzzle break.

The other case is Grant v. Higgins out of Connecticut. The state enacted gun control laws after the Sandy Hook school shooting, where a gunman murdered 20 first graders and six adults.

A district court and the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Connecticut law, ruling it “imposes targeted restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons while preserving numerous legal alternatives for self-defense and other lawful purposes.”

Connecticut urged the high court not to consider the case, asserting, “The Second Amendment does not bar states from banning particularly dangerous weapons that are neither used nor useful for self-defense just because manufacturers flood the market before states respond.”

The court on Tuesday also passed up a chance to consider the legality of laws that restrict people ages 18 to 20 from purchasing or using firearms.

The justices turned away appeals challenging a federal ban on handgun purchases by people ages 18 to 20, as well as a similar state law in Florida imposing the same age requirement on all firearms purchases. The court’s rejection of Democratic-governed Pennsylvania’s appeal in another case, however, left in place a lower court’s ruling that the state’s laws that ban people ages 18 to 20 from carrying firearms in public during a declared state of emergency violate the Second Amendment.

Reuters contributed to this report.