The Supreme Court will finally hear not just one case about bans on so-called assault weapons, but two. They've basically combined two different cases, particularly after the lower courts got pretty damn stupid in their own rulings.
And that's good news for us.
Or is it?
So far, pretty much everyone expects the Court to rule against these bans, even anti-gun attorneys, but let's understand exactly why.
The Bruen ruling established a two-step test lower courts are to use when assessing restrictions on firearm possession. The majority said courts must first assess whether the regulated conduct is covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text, and if so, determine if that regulation is consistent with the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Turning to Viramontes and Grant, Williams observed how the 2nd and 7th Courts of Appeals effectively failed to properly adopt Bruen‘s two-step framework when considering the challenges to the respective laws.
In Viramontes, Williams noted that the 7th Circuit “essentially stops the argument at step one” by analogizing AR-15s to “automatic weapons” like M-16s, which it found are “presumptively not covered by the Second Amendment” under existing SCOTUS precedent. Meanwhile, in Grant, he said that the 2nd Circuit focused more on the second step by accepting Connecticut’s “historical analogues” regarding bans on “certain types of knives” and “machine guns,” and started “to slip closer and closer” to a framework rejected by the Supreme Court in Bruen.
The attorneys also considered the possibility that the Supreme Court may address the lawfulness of restrictions on gun-magazine size in its decision. The sole question agreed to by the justices is whether the Second and 14th Amendments “guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.”
Williams opined that “it’s entirely possible you could see these connected in this decision” because “it’s really kind of hard to separate the magazine out from the firearm to the extent that an AR-15 comes with a standard magazine; it’s generally a 30-round magazine.” He furthermore noted these guns’ wide use among the American public.
Proctor is a bit more doubtful about the magazine aspect here, but admits it could happen. That would be fantastic news, too, because the magazine restrictions are particularly stupid and have even fewer historic analogs than weapons restrictions.
In Viramontes, the court there basically just decided that because AR-15s look like M-16s and fire the same round, they might as well be the same gun, which was particularly grotesque considering the Bruen decision. There was no grounds for such a statement, particularly since the legal definition of a machine gun is something the AR-15 does not meet.
Meanwhile, the court in Grant used bans against things like Bowie knives to justify the ban, as well as the whole machine gun thing, which makes no sense, really, because Bowie knives are available on Amazon right now and aren't firearms. We've already talked about the machine gun thing.
See, what happened in both of these cases is that the judges rationalized their decisions. They didn't do what the law demanded; they twisted things until they made it seem like the law called for what the judges wanted to do from the start. That's not how a legal system is supposed to work. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you introduce humans into a system.
Luckily, the consensus is, in fact, that the Supreme Court will address this when they hear these cases. I sincerely hope that the magazine thing is addressed, too, even though I'm doubtful it will be.
What we really need here is for the Supreme Court to not just end these bans on so-called assault weapons, but to frame it in such a way that there's no hope for lawmakers to try and find an end-around, because we all know that's what they're going to do.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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