Supreme Court Distributes SAF’s Gun Control Challenges to Conference

One of the most popular bits of gun control out there is the assault weapon ban.

It’s so ubiquitous among anti-gunners that one can just assume any gun control advocate will outright call for a ban on anything resembling an AR-15 or similar-style firearm. In their minds, the reasons are so obvious that they don’t even really have to find a way to justify the constitutionality of it.

However, our system doesn’t really tolerate that. You can pass a law banning something, sure, but you need to be able to defend it in court, particularly involving the constitutional nature of the ban.

That’s where the lawyers on both sides come in, and the Second Amendment Foundation announced that two of its assault weapon ban cases have been distributed to conference. 

From a press release:

The U.S. Supreme Court has distributed two Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) cases for conference on Friday, Jan. 10. 

The two cases – Snope v. Brown and Gray v. Jennings – challenge “assault weapons” bans in Maryland and “assault weapons” and magazine capacity bans in Delaware.  

In Snope, SAF is challenging Maryland’s ban on “assault weapons” and is joined in the case by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), and private citizen, David Snope. 

SAF sought cert after the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled en banc that the modern semiautomatic rifles banned by Maryland fall outside the protection of the Second Amendment because they are too similar to military arms. SAF and its partners contend this reasoning “is becoming a commonplace misapplication” of Supreme Court precedents established by the 2008 Heller ruling, 2010 McDonald decision and 2022 Bruen decision.

“Snope provides the Supreme Court with an excellent vehicle to correct the widespread misapplication of the Court’s precedent regarding these firearms and the Second Amendment, itself,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The case is on appeal from final judgment with an en banc decision of a circuit court. Moreover, the specific type of firearm in question is commonly owned across the country, placing it well within the scope and protection of the Second Amendment. By granting cert in Snope, the high court can help settle the matter once and for all.” 

For Gray, SAF and its partners are challenging gun and magazine bans in Delaware and petitioned SCOTUS to rule whether an infringement of Second Amendment rights constitutes per se irreparable injury in the context of a preliminary injunction. Joining SAF in this case is FPC, DJJAMS LLC and two citizens, William Taylor and Gabriel Gray. 

Noting in their petition that the high court has previously ruled that “the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,” SAF and its partners asked the court to determine whether the same standard applies to the Second Amendment. Currently, there exists a circuit split on the issue.

“Any infringements on one right should merit the same degree of scorn as infringements against another right since all are protected equally by the Constitution,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “The Second Amendment should not become a second-class right just because there are those who don’t agree with it.”

For the record, I tend to lump magazine bans in with assault weapon bans in my own mind because they tend to go hand-in-hand. Many assault weapon bans include restrictions on magazine capacity much like the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban did.

And it’s all a blatant violation of the Constitution.

The Maryland ruling, for example, argues that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect modern sporting rifles because they’re too similar to military weapons, but where in the Second Amendment does it declare that there’s a line in the sand that a gun design must meet? It talks about the “well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” which suggests not only is there no such line but that our Founding Fathers wanted us to have military-grade weapons.

Or better.

My hope is that the Supreme Court will hear these cases, then rule along the same lines as it did with Bruen. There are no meaningful parallels to the era of our nation’s founding to an assault weapon ban, and these judges didn’t even try to claim there was one. They just push these things through and just assume we have to take it.

We. Do. Not.