Supreme Court Won’t Hear Cases on High-Powered Rifles and Disarming Felons

The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear two sets of Second Amendment challenges: to an Illinois law prohibiting the sale of high-powered guns and high-capacity magazines and to a federal law making it a crime for people convicted of felonies to possess guns.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have granted the petitions seeking review in the Illinois case.

The court returned cases on the federal law concerning felons to lower courts for reconsideration in light of its recent decision in United States v. Rahimi, which upheld a similar law making it a crime for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders to have guns.

The moves suggested that the Supreme Court, which issued two major decisions on guns in the term that ended Monday, is not ready to return to the subject for now.

In his opinion in the Illinois case, Justice Thomas wrote that “we have never squarely addressed what types of weapons are ‘arms’ protected by the Second Amendment.”

He criticized the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Illinois, for a preliminary ruling upholding the law, calling its decision “contrived” and “nonsensical.”