Less than a week after the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law that barred gun owners with concealed-carry licenses from bringing guns onto private property unless they had explicit permission from the property’s owner, the justices announced that they will weigh in on the constitutionality of bans on AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles.
The announcement came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ conference on Monday, June 29. That conference, which is colloquially known as the “clean-up conference,” has traditionally served as an opportunity for the justices to dispose of any petitions for review that may have been on hold until they issued opinions on the merits in cases presenting similar issues. But in recent years, the court has also used the conference as one last opportunity to add new cases to its docket for the following term, as it did on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court last year turned down a request to weigh in on a challenge to the constitutionality of a Maryland law banning semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15. Three justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch – indicated in Snope v. Brown that they would have granted the challengers’ petition for review, while a fourth justice – Brett Kavanaugh – described the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upholding the ban as “questionable.” Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”
Just over a year later, Kavanaugh’s prediction came to fruition. In a brief order on Tuesday, the justices agreed to take up both an Illinois man’s challenge to Cook County’s ban on semiautomatic rifles and a challenge by gun owners and gun-rights groups to a similar law in Connecticut. The cases will be argued together, most likely in the fall.
The Illinois case was brought by Cutberto Viramontes, who went to federal court in Chicago in 2021 to argue that the county’s prohibition violates his Second Amendment right to bear arms. The lower courts upheld the law, pointing to a 2023 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Bevis v. City of Naperville that rejected a similar challenge. In Bevis, the 7th Circuit explained in Viramontes’ case, the court of appeals had ruled that the plaintiffs seeking preliminary relief had not shown “that the covered firearms materially differed from machineguns and military-grade weaponry, which the Supreme Court instructed can be banned under the Second Amendment.” And nothing in the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases, the 7th Circuit continued, provided any reason to overrule Bevis.
Viramontes came to the Supreme Court in August, asking the justices to take up his case. He argued that the court should “guarantee fundamental Second Amendment rights and … address the confusion in the lower courts over how to apply this Court’s precedent in arms bans cases—precedent that is straightforward but that the lower courts have proven incapable of applying correctly.”
Cook County urged the justices to deny review, pointing to what it characterized as the lethality of assault rifles and the absence from the record in the case “of even a single instance in which assault weapons were ever used in lawful self-defense.” And that lethality, the county continued, also “deter[s] effective, prompt law enforcement intervention” when such weapons are used in mass shootings. But in any event, the county concluded, this dispute is not an appropriate one to address the legality of the ban on semiautomatic rifles because Viramontes “simply did not bother to compile a record sufficient to support his constitutional challenge,” opting instead to “lose fast and seek review in” the Supreme Court.
Connecticut passed the law at the center of Grant v. Higgins in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a 20-year-old, after killing his mother at her home, murdered 20 first-graders and six adults.
A federal court in Connecticut turned down the challengers’ request to temporarily block the state from enforcing the ban, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld that ruling. It reasoned that the ban “impose[s] targeted restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons while preserving numerous legal alternatives for self-defense and other lawful purposes.” Moreover, it added, it “impose[s] a burden comparable to historical antecedents that regulated other unusually dangerous weapons unsuitable for and disproportionate to the objective of individual self-defense.”
The challengers came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to decide whether the ban can stand. They argued that, under the court’s prior decisions, “a firearm cannot be banned if it is in common use for lawful purposes. If the most popular rifle in the country is not in common use,” they said, “it is hard to see what that phrase could possibly mean.”
The state countered that the prevalence of semiautomatic rifles does not mean that they are immune from restrictions. “The Second Amendment,” it argued, “does not bar states from banning particularly dangerous weapons that are neither used nor useful for self-defense just because manufacturers flood the market before states respond. That is especially true when the weapons’ unique dangers are brought to the fore by new societal developments nobody predicted when the technology came out, like the current mass shooting epidemic.”
The justices turned down a group of requests to weigh in on the constitutionality of restrictions on the gun rights of young people under the age of 21. The challengers had argued that such restrictions violate the Second Amendment rights of 18- to 20-year-olds. Thomas indicated that he would have granted review in one of those cases – West Virginia Citizens Defense League v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, involving a federal law that bans the commercial sale of handguns to anyone under the age of 21.
The justices apparently did not act on other gun-rights cases that it had been considering at its conferences for several months, involving challenges to bans on large-capacity magazines – that is, devices that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition that can be fed into a semi-automatic weapon.
In addition to the gun-rights cases, the justices also granted review in two additional cases: Grand v. City of University Heights, in which an Orthodox Jewish man in Ohio is asking the court to revive his religious-discrimination lawsuit against city officials who told him he needed a permit to host a prayer group in his home; and Apple v. Epic Games, in which Apple has asked the court to weigh in on how clear a court order must be before a litigant can be held in contempt for violating it.
Finally, the court turned down the Trump administration’s request to clear the way for it to fire the top U.S. copyright official, Shira Perlmutter, after a lower court ordered the government to temporarily reinstate her.
The head of the U.S. Copyright Office is known as the Register of Copyrights, and she is the primary adviser to Congress on copyright issues. The Register of Copyrights is housed within the Library of Congress; she is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, who is in turn nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve a 10-year term.
Perlmutter went to federal court, seeking to block her removal. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., turned down her request for an order that would temporarily reinstate her while her challenge to her firing continued. But in an order on Sept. 10, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted that request, and on Monday the Supreme Court declined to intervene. In a brief, unsigned order, the court indicated that its decision not to interfere “is not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation.”
Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Court grants several new cases, including on whether the Second Amendment protects possession of semiautomatic rifles , SCOTUSblog (Jun. 30, 2026, 1:22 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-grants-several-new-cases-including-on-whether-the-second-amendment-protects-possession-of-/