The Supreme Court will hear the most significant Second Amendment case in years on December 2, when it considers whether the Constitution protects the right to possess AR-15 platform rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms. The consolidated cases challenge bans in Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut, and the Court's answer will settle a question that lower courts have now answered three different ways: what happens when a weapon is both popular and dangerous.
The case arrives with the federal government on the challengers' side. On September 4, Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a roughly forty-page brief urging the Court to reverse, arguing that "the AR-15 rifle is unquestionably in common use among law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes." Twenty-seven or twenty-eight state attorneys general, along with the NRA and other groups, have aligned with the challengers. Groups including Everytown Law support the bans. The briefing schedule runs through October, with argument set for 10 a.m. on December 2 and a decision expected by late June 2027.
The two cases, and their opposite roads
The Court granted cert in June in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, one hour of argument for both. The question as framed in the Illinois case asks directly whether the amendments guarantee "the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles."
The two circuits below upheld the bans for almost opposite reasons. The Seventh Circuit, in a challenge to Cook County's ordinance, which dates to 1993 and names more than 125 rifle models, held on an undeveloped record that the challengers had not shown the rifles "materially differed from machineguns and military-grade weaponry." The Second Circuit, upholding Connecticut's 1993 ban, expanded after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, assumed the rifles were in common use and upheld the law anyway, as "targeted restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons while preserving numerous legal alternatives," drawing an analogy to nineteenth-century Bowie-knife bans. One court said the guns may be beyond protection. The other said protection does not decide the case. Neither approach would be sufficient for both.
The split arrived three weeks after the grant. On July 17, the Third Circuit, sitting en banc, struck down New Jersey's ban and magazine limit, the first circuit to invalidate an assault-weapons law since the Court's Bruen decision reset Second Amendment analysis. New Jersey may seek review, and the disagreement among the circuits is now explicit.
The argument for the bans
The states' strongest case rests on danger and purpose. Connecticut has argued that "Americans do not commonly own assault weapons for self-defense," that the rifles are disproportionately used in mass shootings, and that popularity cannot immunize a category of weapons, because "manufacturers flood the market before states respond." Cook County's attorneys invoke "the trauma that assault weapon massacres have inflicted on the public at large," and the county has argued that there is not a single documented instance in its record of lawful self-defense use of these rifles. Under this theory, the Second Amendment protects arms in common use for lawful purposes, but a weapon can be common without being in common use for lawful purposes, and the history of restricting unusually dangerous weapons while leaving alternatives available, from Bowie knives to gunpowder regulations, supplies the constitutional tradition Bruen requires.
The argument against the bans
The challengers' case, joined by the Solicitor General, runs on the same framework with the opposite reading. Heller and Bruen protect arms in common use for lawful purposes, and the AR-15 is by several measures the most popular rifle in the country: an estimated 20 to 30 million are in circulation, legal in about forty-one states, used for self-defense, hunting and sport. History, they argue, permits banning only weapons that are both dangerous and unusual, and the federal assault-weapons ban of 1994 lapsed in 2004 precisely because the weapons became ordinary. The government's brief adds a proportionality point: handguns are involved in far more crime than rifles, and if the amendment protects handguns, it cannot lose to a category defined largely by features. The Third Circuit majority made the same move in reverse, reasoning that banning common arms fails Bruen even when the aim is reducing gun violence.
The two sides share the same test and disagree on every input: what "common" means, what "lawful purposes" require, and whether danger alone can push a popular weapon outside protection.
What the Court's answer will change
The decision's reach extends well beyond the two laws at issue. Roughly a dozen states and the District of Columbia have assault-weapons bans, with counts varying by definition. Illinois added a statewide ban in 2023, and challenges to New York's SAFE Act wait in lower courts. A ruling that common use is measured by circulation and lawful ownership would jeopardize most of those laws. A ruling that dangerousness can justify restrictions on popular weapons would preserve them and close the Third Circuit's opening.
The Court has been steering toward this case for three terms. It declined a similar Maryland challenge, as the Duke Center for Firearms Law documented, in which Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch would have granted review, and Justice Kavanaugh wrote then that the Court "should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon." The composition that produced the current doctrine, Heller's common-use test refined by Bruen's history-and-tradition requirement, is the composition that will now apply both to a weapon class no prior Supreme Court case has addressed. Whatever one believes about gun policy, the legal question is narrower and harder than the political one, and it is now calendared: whether a rifle owned in the millions and banned in about a dozen states sits inside the amendment or outside it. The argument is December 2. The answer is next summer.
Primary sources
- SCOTUSblog case pages for the grants, the consolidated question, and the December 2 argument date.
- The Solicitor General's amicus brief as reported by the Epoch Times for the government's position.
- Reason's Volokh Conspiracy coverage for the Second Circuit's reasoning and the historical analogies.
- Reuters for the Third Circuit's July 17 en banc decision.
- AP reporting for circulation estimates and the state-ban counts.
- Duke Center for Firearms Law for the Snope denial and Kavanaugh's statement.