The U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Maryland ban on AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and a Rhode Island ban on high-capacity magazines to remain in effect by declining two cases challenging the state bans on Monday.
According to Fox News, the cases against Maryland’s ban on AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and Rhode Island’s ban on high-capacity magazines were appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts previously upheld the bans. The outlet noted that Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Samuel Alito indicated that they would have agreed to review the cases challenging the two state bans.
Fox News reported that the Supreme Court’s decision not to review Maryland’s ban against AR-15 rifles upholds the previous ruling made by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which claimed that states banning AR-15 rifles did not violate the Second Amendment. According to the outlet, the 4th Circuit claimed that allowing AR-15 rifles to be protected under the Constitution based on the weapon’s popularity would potentially allow any weapon to “gain constitutional protection merely because it becomes popular before the government can sufficiently regulate it.”
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In a Monday statement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that states such as Maryland that ban U.S. citizens from owning AR-15 rifles are “somewhat of an outlier” since 41 of the 50 states allow people to purchase AR-15 rifles.
“In short, under this Court’s precedents, the Fourth Circuit’s decision is questionable. Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review,” Kavanaugh wrote. He added, “Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term of two.”
Thomas expressed his disagreement with the Supreme Court’s decision not to review appeals against Maryland and Rhode Island’s bans on Monday. Thomas claimed that the Fourth Circuit put “too high a burden on the challengers to show that the Second Amendment presumptively protected their conduct. And, its determination that AR-15s are dangerous and unusual does not withstand scrutiny.”
“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” Thomas wrote. “That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”
