WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the challenge of assault weapons ban, is popular among gun owners and has been used in multiple mass shootings.
Most people do not explain their rejection case in the typical case. But three conservative justices from the nine-person court have publicly pointed out their differences, with the fourth saying he is skeptical of the ban being constitutional.
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have taken the case, and Clarence Thomas wrote respectively that the law may be related to the Second Amendment.
“I won't wait for the government to ban America's most popular rifles,” Thomas wrote. “This question is crucial to the tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners across the country.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the decision to file now on the case, but said he was skeptical of the injunction as a constitutional one, and he hoped the court would resolve the issue “in the next semester or two.”
Maryland's law passed in 2012 after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six adults. The shooter is equipped with an AR-15, one of the guns commonly known as assault weapons.
Several states have similar measures, and Congressional Democrats support this concept. Challengers believe that people have constitutional rights to guns like the AR-15.
The case comes three years after the High Court ruled a landmark ruling that expanded Second Amendment rights and challenged gun laws across the country.
Ten states and the District of Columbia have similar laws covering major cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Congress allowed a national ban on assault weapons to expire in 2004.
Gun rights groups believe that the ban on popular weapons violates people's Second Amendment rights. Maryland lawyers believe guns are not protected by the Second Amendment because they resemble military-grade weapons.
The law banned dozens of guns, including the AR-15, AK-47 and Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, and imposed 10 rounds of restrictions on Gun Magazines.
Thomas and Kavanaugh have previously expressed doubts about the ban on assault weapons.
As a 2011 Court of Appeals judge, Kavanaugh wrote that he had different opinions, saying similar measures in Washington, D.C. were unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Thomas disagreed in 2015, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the challenge of municipal ban AR-15 weapons, writing that the “overwhelming majority” of those who owned the weapons used it for legal purposes such as self-defense.
The High Court issued a ruling in 2022 that expanded gun rights and told lower judges that they should no longer consider factors such as public safety to determine whether gun laws are constitutional. Instead, they should focus on whether the law fits in the country’s historic gun possession tradition, the court said.
This has led to a series of challenges in gun laws across the country, subject to multiple restrictions, and confusion among low-level judges about books that gun laws can retain.
Since then, the Supreme Court has overturned the ban on rapid gun muzzles, but has upheld a law that prohibits guns and regulations for nearly untrackable ghost guns under domestic violence restrictions.
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