Last week, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case challenging a 4th U.S. Circuit Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of Maryland’s ban on the possession of certain semiautomatic rifles labeled by the state as “assault weapons.”
At least three justices expressed support for reviewing the 4th Circuit’s decision. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch indicated they would have granted the petition, though they offered no additional comment. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the Court’s decision not to hear the case, criticizing what he described as the Court’s decade-long reluctance to address a matter of such constitutional importance.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, appeared positioned to provide the crucial fourth vote needed for the Court to take up the case, but ultimately declined. Despite this, he authored several paragraphs outlining his concerns with the lower court’s opinion, accurately highlighting numerous troubling aspects of the ruling.
He even acknowledged that the petitioners “have a strong argument that AR-15s are in ‘common use’ by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment.” But he said he favored waiting for further rulings from lower courts of appeal first.
Despite having a clear opportunity to reaffirm its Second Amendment precedent in the face of ongoing legal challenges, the Court once again opted to sidestep the issue—continuing a familiar pattern of avoiding decisive rulings on gun rights.
The case, Snope v. Brown, challenged the constitutionality of a Maryland law that criminalizes the possession of many widely owned semiautomatic rifles, based solely on their inclusion of so-called “military-style” features or their presence on a state-defined list of firearms labeled as “assault weapons.” Under a faithful application of the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment rulings, the 4th Circuit should have found the law clearly unconstitutional, according to the Daily Signal.
“Consider the 2022 case of New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said courts should refrain from deciding Second Amendment cases via means-end interest balancing—that is, by weighing the importance of the government’s public policy objectives against the burden the law imposes on individual rights,” the outlet said.
“Instead, under the Bruen test, as long as the law burdens a person’s right to keep and bear arms under the amendment’s plain text, the government must demonstrate that its law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation,” the report added.
The Supreme Court has clarified which firearms are constitutionally protected and the reasons behind this. Prior cases repeatedly emphasized that the Second Amendment “extends, prima-facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”
Although the nation has a long history of regulating weapons that are both “dangerous and unusual,” the government lacks the authority to prohibit entire categories of firearms that are commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, The Daily Signal added.
