The U.S. Supreme Court continued its recent confounding history of punting important Second Amendment-related cases back to lower court rulings. Rulings that are often contradictory.
On Monday, justices declined to hear arguments in Snope v. Brown and Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island. The former challenged a lower court ruling that Maryland’s ban on most semi-automatic rifles is constitutional, while the latter upheld Rhode Island’s controversial magazine capacity limits.
Gun rights supporters have no choice but to wait for SCOTUS to settle the issue
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote concerning Snope: “Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this court’s ultimate decision on the AR-15 issue. 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.”
Or it could continue to kick the can down the road.
Gun rights organizations nationwide focused considerable energy on overturning bans on semi-automatic rifles and standard-capacity magazines. But for the foreseeable future, there will continue to be nine states plus the District of Columbia that prohibit popular long guns merely for cosmetic reasons.
Justices stood on controversial lower court decisions in a blow to gun rights
On Monday, virtually the same court that handed down 2022’s landmark Bruen decision demonstrated its reluctance to take up Second Amendment cases.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented. The trio indicated they would have chosen to hear the gun rights arguments.
In the suit over the Maryland AR-15 ban, the high court sided with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision claimed that statewide bans on popular sporting rifles are consistent with the Second Amendment.
The 4th Circuit bought the argument that abiding by the “common use” standard could lead to dangerous weapons gaining constitutional protection before governments could step in and regulate them.
Kavanaugh wrote that Maryland’s AR-15 ban likely contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision.
“The case primarily concerns Maryland’s ban on the AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle. Americans today possess an estimated 20 to 30 million AR-15s, and AR-15s are legal in 41 of the 50 states, meaning that the states such as Maryland that prohibit AR-15s are somewhat of an outlier,” Kavanaugh explained. “Given that millions of Americans own AR-15s and that a significant majority of the states allow possession of these rifles, petitioners have a strong argument that AR-15s are in ‘common use’ by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment under Heller.”
Thomas questioned the wisdom of delaying a decision clarifying the legality of the nation’s most popular long gun. “I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America. The question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country.”
The conservative justice noted that lower courts appear set on “distorting this Court’s Second Amendment precedents.”
Thomas further explained that there is a very real danger that AR-15s could arbitrarily be reclassified as “machineguns” simply because some criminals illegally add devices to the weapons to change their fire rate.
In other words, the embattled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) could wake up one day and change the criminal status of countless Americans.
That would mean that upstanding gun owners would instantly become criminals with merely an unelected bureaucrat’s signature. At that point, the Second Amendment and other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms would rely on the government’s goodwill, and Thomas declared that is “no constitutional guarantee at all.”
It is high time the court took up these critical issues. Tens of millions of good Americans are being denied their Second Amendment rights for nothing more than political grandstanding, and that must end.There’s no better way to support the 2A than with merch that speaks before you do.
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