SCOTUS Looks Unlikely To Consider Assault Weapons — For Now

When Justice Clarence Thomas penned a sweeping reinterpretation of the Second Amendment two years ago, it came as welcome news to opponents of assault weapons bans. Thomas’ ruling in the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen instructed lower courts to stop balancing the need for public safety against the right to bear arms.

Instead, the constitutionality of gun restrictions would depend only on whether a given law fit within a tradition of firearm regulation dating from between the signing of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the end of the Civil War.

After Bruen , the Supreme Court vacated four lower court decisions upholding gun laws and sent them back for reconsideration under the new Second Amendment standard. One of them was a case challenging the constitutionality of Maryland’s assault weapons ban.

Gun rights groups had spent decades trying to win Second Amendment protections for semiautomatic rifles without success. With Bruen, they got a favorable ruling that opened a new line of attack on assault weapons bans. The flagship liberal response to the problem of mass shootings never looked so vulnerable. New Mexico legislators declined to even consider an assault weapons ban last year, fearing it would only get enjoined and overturned by a Supreme Court with a lopsided 6-3 conservative majority.

But two years after the seismic Bruen shift, assault weapons bans stand on unexpectedly sure footing.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that Maryland ban last week after the Supreme Court set the new gun rights standard in Bruen, handing reformers a major victory. Two other circuits have also declined to extend constitutional protections to so-called “assault rifles” — the semiautomatics