The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging bans on popular semi-automatic rifles that local governments have defined in different ways as being “assault weapons.”
Grant v. Higgins is a challenge to Connecticut’s ban on its definition of “assault weapons” and Viramontes v. Cook County, Illinois is a challenge to Cook County’s ban on what it deems to be “assault-weapons.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Connecticut’s ban in August 2025, while the Seventh Circuit upheld Cook County’s ban in June 2025. The Supreme Court will hear these cases together in the next term.
The Supreme Court had chosen not to hear a challenge to Maryland’s ban on these commonly owned semi-automatic rifles last year. At the time, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they would have granted the challengers’ petition for review in Snope v. Brown. Also at the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upholding Maryland’s ban as “questionable.” Kavanaugh further wrote that the Supreme Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon … .”
Now the high court has agreed to review the constitutionality of these bans.
As the mainstream media is unlikely to give a fact-based analysis of the constitutionality of these bans, here are three points that should be in every article about this challenge.
1. The Semi-Automatic is an Old Technology
Gun-control groups and the politicians who want to disarm Americans pretend that semi-automatic technology is new or has only been popular recently; actually, this technology has been around since before Grover Cleveland first became president in 1885. The technology that uses the gases from a fired cartridge to load the next cartridge was invented when most people were still using horses to travel, long before the Wright Brothers first flew, and decades before the discovery of penicillin.
2. AR-15s are Commonly Owned
By the first decade of the 20th century, many American arms makers were selling very popular semi-automatic rifles. American citizens now own an estimated 20-25 million AR-type rifles. The AR-type rifle—initially developed in the 1950s and first sold to the general public in the 1960s—is easily the best-selling rifle type sold in America today. As semi-automatic pistols dominate the handgun market and semi-automatic rifles make up a large portion (if not a majority) of rifle sales, the majority of new firearms sold in the U.S. each year are generally believed to be semi-automatic.
So, by definition, semi-automatics are a normal part of the American landscape. The U.S. Supreme Court has continually found that the Second Amendment protects firearms that are in common use.
3. AR-15s are Suitable Home-Defense Firearms
Gun-control activists in politics, the media, and groups like to refer to the AR-type rifle as being unusually dangerous, but rifles of all types are used in less than 3 percent of murders in the U.S. each year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The FBI does not attempt to break down the data to determine what portion of that less than 3 percent was from murderers who used semi-automatic rifles.
Meanwhile, the AR-type rifles these bans include are often chosen as home-defense guns. They offer high capacity, are accurate, quick to handle, generally have light recoil, and so, in sum, offer a lot of protection to the armed citizen until help can arrive.
So-called “assault weapons” have clear constitutional protections and have proven to be widely used for home-defense, competition, and hunting—these reasons are, of course, why they are so popular with the American public.
For these and other reasons, the NRA has been fighting “assault weapon” bans for several decades, with ongoing challenges in Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington. Now the Supreme Court has taken the opportunity to determine if bans on these commonly possessed firearms violate the Second Amendment.
