#SCOTUS announced on Monday that it would NOT hear a major #SecondAmendment challenge to a Maryland #law banning #SemiautomaticRifles like the #AR15. As is the court’s practice, its brief order gave no reasons.
The move, over the objections of 3 conservative justices, let the ban stand & reflected the court’s intermittent engagement with #GunRights. It has issued only 3 significant #2A decisions since recognizing an individual right to own #guns in 2008.
The Maryland law was enacted in 2013 in response to the #MassShooting at #SandyHook Elementary School in Connecticut the previous year. It banned many semiautomatic rifles & imposed a 10-round limit on #GunMagazines.
In dissent, Justice #ClarenceThomas said the court should have considered the question, which the justices have repeatedly declined to resolve.
“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” #ClarenceThomas wrote. “That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding #AR15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”
He added that the court’s commitment to the #SecondAmendment was inadequate.
“I doubt we would sit idly by if lower courts were to so subvert our precedents involving any other constitutional right,” [ummm what?] he wrote. “Until we are vigilant in enforcing it, the right to bear arms will remain ‘a second-class right.’” [#hypocrisy]
Justices #Alito & #Gorsuch said they too would have heard the case but did not provide reasons.
Justice Brett M. #Kavanaugh, who could have supplied the fourth vote needed to add the case to the court’s docket, issued a statement saying the question was significant & could soon warrant review but that he hoped additional opinions from lower courts could assist the justices on the issue. He wrote that #SCOTUS “should & presumably will address the #AR15 issue soon, in the next term or two.”
That eventual case will require the court to apply its recently minted test for assessing constitutional challenges to #GunControl measures, that requires judges to strike down such laws unless they are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In a 10-to-5 ruling in Aug, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in VA, said the Maryland #law satisfied that history-based test, which was set out in #SCOTUS 2022 ruling, NY State Rifle & Pistol Assn v. Bruen.
The #law’s ban on what critics call #AssaultWeapons ban did not violate the #SecondAmendment because rapid-firing long guns “are #military-style weapons designed for sustained #combat operations that are ill-suited & disproportionate to the need for self-defense,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
“We decline to wield the #Constitution to declare that #military-style armaments, which have become primary instruments of #MassKilling & #terrorist attacks in the #UnitedStates, are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes,” Judge Wilkinson added.
#law #SCOTUS #SecondAmendment #WMD #SemiautomaticRifles #AR15 #GunControl
Wow, he really doesn't understand the law as it comes to 2nd Amendment protections. It emphatically has nothing to do with "military-style."
Further, wield the Constitution? No, that's not how the US system works; it's backwards.
To paraphrase the joke, In United States, Constitution wield you!
