The Supreme Court won’t hear the challenge to Maryland’s “assault weapon” and magazine case.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas would have granted the petition for a writ of certiorari for both cases.
The Snope case started in 2021 as Bianchi v. Frost. I’m not kidding.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a statement “respecting the denial of certiorari (emphasis mine):”
In District of Columbia v. Heller, this Court ruled that the Second Amendment must be interpreted in light of constitutional text, history, and tradition. 554 U. S. 570, 576–628 (2008). The Court further determined that the Second Amendment protects those weapons that are in “common use” by law-abiding citizens. Id., at 624, 627. Because handguns are in common use by law-abiding citizens, the Court held that the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violated the Second Amendment. Id., at 628–629. The Court’s later Second Amendment decisions in Bruen and Rahimi did not disturb the historically based “common use” test with respect to the possession of particular weapons. See New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1, 47 (2022); see also United States v. Rahimi, 602 U. S. 680, 735–736 (2024) (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring); post, at 1–6 (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari).Given that millions of Americans own AR–15s and that a significant majority of the States allow possession of those 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. See Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F. 3d 1244, 1286–1288 (CADC 2011) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). If so, then the Fourth Circuit would have erred by holding that Maryland’s ban on AR–15s complies with the Second Amendment.Under this Court’s Second Amendment precedents, moreover, it can be analytically difficult to distinguish the AR–15s at issue here from the handguns at issue in Heller. AR–15s are semi-automatic, but so too are most handguns. (Semi-automatic handguns and rifles are distinct from automatic firearms such as the M–16 automatic rifle used by the military.) Law-abiding citizens use both AR–15s and handguns for a variety of lawful purposes, including selfdefense in the home. For their part, criminals use both AR–15s and handguns, as well as a variety of other lawful weapons and products, in unlawful ways that threaten public safety. But handguns can be more easily carried and concealed than rifles, and handguns—not rifles—are used in the vast majority of murders and other violent crimes that individuals commit with guns in America.In short, under this Court’s precedents, the Fourth Circuit’s decision is questionable. Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review. The AR–15 issue was recently decided by the First Circuit and is currently being considered by several other Courts of Appeals. See Capen v. Campbell, 134 F. 4th 660 (CA1 2025); see also, e.g., National Assn. for Gun Rights v. Lamont, 685 F. Supp. 3d 63 (Conn. 2023), appeal pending, No. 23–1162 (CA2); Association of N. J. Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Platkin, 742 F. Supp. 3d 421 (NJ 2024), appeal pending, No. 24–2415 (CA3); Viramontes v. County of Cook, No. 1:21–cv–4595 (ND Ill., Mar. 1, 2024), appeal pending, No. 24–1437 (CA7); Miller v. Bonta, 699 F. Supp. 3d 956 (SD Cal. 2023), appeal pending, No. 23–2979 (CA9). Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decisionmaking 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, in the next Term or two.
Excuse me? Your job is literally to interpret the Constitution. Literally.
What a cop out.
Basically: “We don’t want to touch a controversial topic right now even though we know the Fourth Circuit had crap justifications and the ban obvs violates the Second Amendment. Besides there are more cases coming up.”
SCOTUS needs four votes to hear a case. Kavanaugh is a coward.
Thomas clearly interprets the Constitution for Kavanaugh (emphasis mine):
To start, AR–15s are clearly “Arms” under the Second Amendment’s plain text. In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570 (2008), we held that the term “Arms” in this context covers all “‘[w]eapons of offence, or armour of defence.’” Id., at 581; see also ibid. (explaining that “Arms” include “‘any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another’”). Thus, “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.” Id., at 582; accord, United States v. Rahimi, 602 U. S. 680, 691 (2024); Bruen, 597 U. S., at 28; Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U. S. 411 (2016) (per curiam). AR–15s fall squarely within this category.Because AR–15s are “Arms,” the burden shifts to Maryland to show that banning AR–15s is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Bruen, 597 U. S., at 17. But, I am not aware of any “historical regulation” that could serve as “a proper analogue” to Maryland’s ban. Id., at 28–29.
Thomas then slams his colleagues for the delay:
I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America. 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. See Harrel, 603 U. S. ___; Friedman, 577 U. S. 1039. And, further percolation is of little value when lower courts in the jurisdictions that ban AR–15s appear bent on distorting this Court’s Second Amendment precedents. See Harrel, 603 U. S., at ___ (opinion of THOMAS, J.) (slip op., at 2) (discussing the Seventh Circuit’s parallel conclusion that AR–15s do “not even fall within the scope of the Arms referred to by the Second Amendment”). I doubt we would sit idly by if lower courts were to so subvert our precedents involving any other constitutional right. Until we are vigilant in enforcing it, the right to bear arms will remain “a second-class right.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 780 (2010) (plurality opinion).
Thomas invoked Bondi v. VanDerStok, where SCOTUS upheld an ATF regulation that places objects that “may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to” a firearm under the definition of a firearm.
In Thomas’s dissent in Bondi, he quoted a line from the case: “every single AR-15 can be converted to a machinegun using flimsy pieces of metal-including coat hangers.”
Therefore, the ATF could declare AR-15s as machine guns “prohibited under federal law.”
“Until we resolve whether the Second Amendment forecloses that possibility, law-abiding AR–15 owners must rely on the goodwill of a federal agency to retain their means of self-defense,” Thomas added.
Here’s the history of the case.
In 2022, the case “had been fully briefed and decided on the merits before the Bruen decision was handed down later that year.
But after Bruen, the judgment was vacated and sent back to the Fourth Circuit.
In August 2024, the Fourth Circuit upheld the ban:
For these reasons, we decline to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes. In so holding, we offer no view on how a state should regulate firearms. Nor do we do anything to impose Maryland’s regulations upon other states. We do hold, however, that Maryland was well within its constitutional prerogative to legislate as it did. We therefore reject the challenges of appellants and affirm the judgment of the district court.
Can you be more dramatic?! My goodness, it takes a lot of effort to misinterpret the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights.
[Featured image via YouTube]
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY