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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Arguments on a Case That Could Truly Gut the Anti-Gun Left

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 01, 2026 6:30 AM

It’s the firearm that the anti-gun Left despises. It’s the main focus of their fundraising mailers. It’s the big, bad AR-15 rifle, which is common and widely owned, even though it’s banned in some blue states. The Court didn’t hear arguments last term about whether banning this rifle through so-called assault weapons bans is constitutional. 

Virginia recently passed such a law, but it was temporarily blocked; it was set to take effect today. Should the Supreme Court strike down these laws and affirm that banning these firearms is unconstitutional, it’ll be a major blow to the anti-gun Left (via SCOTUSblog):

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.

Also, we have more transgender issues and matters of citizenship and election integrity on the docket.