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The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear arguments in a pair of significant Second Amendment challenges involving certain semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, a move that leaves both of those laws in place.
One of the appeals dealt with Maryland’s ban on certain semi-automatic weapons such as AR- and AK-style rifles. The law, enacted after the deadly 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, was challenged by David Snope, a state resident who wants to purchase those rifles for self-defense and other purposes.
The Supreme Court also declined to hear a challenge to Rhode Island’s ban on high-capacity gun magazines, leaving that law in place.
As is typical, the court did not explain its reasoning in denying the cases, though it has denied several high profile gun appeals over the past year. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the pair of cases.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another member of the court’s conservative wing, noted that other cases involving AR-style rifles are pending in lower courts and said that “this court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon.”
The 2022 Rhode Island law prohibits the possession of large-capacity feeding devices or magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. It requires owners of such devices to either modify them to fit the 10-round limit, sell them to a firearms dealer, remove them from Rhode Island or hand them over to law enforcement.
The law required such action to be taken within 180 days of its passage, after which time violators faced up to five years in prison.
Meanwhile, in the Maryland case involving automatic rifles, the Richmond-based federal appeals court upheld Maryland’s law over the summer, finding that the guns at issue are “dangerous and unusual weapons” and therefore are not covered by the Second Amendment’s protections. The majority also concluded that there were historical analogues to the Maryland statute that were adopted by state legislatures across the country in the 19th and 20th century.
US Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who was named to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, wrote for the court that “we decline to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes.”
In dissent, US Circuit Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump nominee, wrote that the majority opinion “disregards the Founders’ wisdom and replaces it with its own.”
Following the Supreme Court’s blockbuster 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down a strict requirement in New York that residents show cause to obtain a carry permit, the justices have largely avoided major guns cases. In July, for instance, the court declined to take up a challenge to a similar ban on assault-style weapons in Illinois.
The decisions have had the practical effect of leaving the gun prohibitions in place amid a fierce debate playing out in lower courts over exactly what the Supreme Court meant by requiring firearm laws to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition.”
Last year, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that prohibits Americans who are the subject of certain domestic abuse restraining orders from owning a weapon, despite the fact that no identical law existed at the time of the nation’s founding.
Thomas said in a solo dissent on Monday that the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals had erred in upholding the Maryland law.
The prohibition, Thomas wrote, could not be squared with the 2022 decision in Bruen, which he authored, that said the nation’s gun laws must have a connection to history to survive constitutional scrutiny.
“It is difficult to see how Maryland’s categorical prohibition on AR–15s passes muster under this framework,” Thomas wrote in dissent.
Two lower courts refused to block the Rhode Island law, with the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals saying in a ruling last March that the ban was a lawful response by state lawmakers to “a public safety concern.”
Attorneys for the law’s challengers – several individual gun owners and a registered firearms dealer in the state – told the Supreme Court that the ban is not only a violation of the Second Amendment but that it also runs afoul of the Constitution’s Takings Clause because it “forces citizens to dispossess themselves of their lawfully acquired property without any compensation from the state.”
They asked the court to take up the case to resolve the question of “whether and when the government may ban – and even confiscate from law-abiding citizens – common arms.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
