The federal government is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to side with gun owners challenging state and local bans on AR-15-style rifles.
In a brief filed Friday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to overturn rulings from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Seventh Circuits, which upheld AR-15 bans in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois, respectively.
“The AR-15 rifle is unquestionably in common use among law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” the federal government argued.
The cases, Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, have been consolidated for Supreme Court review.
Connecticut has prohibited what it deemed “assault weapons” since 1993. It significantly expanded the ban after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, describing AR-15-style rifles as particularly dangerous and preferred by mass shooters.
Cook County, which covers the city of Chicago, adopted its current firearm ordinance in 2006, prohibiting the possession, sale, and transfer of a list of semiautomatic weapons.
The ‘Common Use’ Debate
At the center of the dispute is whether AR-15-style rifles qualify as weapons “in common use” for lawful purposes and therefore fall under Second Amendment protection.
The idea dates back to the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision upholding a federal ban on short-barreled shotguns because those weapons were not “in common use.”
The Court relied on the same concept in 2008 to invalidate a ban on handguns in the nation’s capital, affirming that they are “the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home.”
Most recently, the Court referred to the common-use test in 2022 when it struck down a New York law requiring people to show a special need before receiving a license to carry a handgun in public.
Connecticut argues that AR-15-style rifles do not meet the Supreme Court’s legal standard.
“Americans do not commonly own assault weapons for self-defense,” state lawyers argued in an earlier Supreme Court filing, adding that the weapons are “neither used nor useful for that purpose.”
The gun owners challenging the bans, however, argue that AR-15s easily pass the common-use test.
“If the most popular rifle in the country is not in common use,” the challengers said in their petition, “it is hard to see what that phrase could possibly mean.”
The Justice Department is siding with challengers in the debate.
“Today, AR-15s are lawful at the federal level and in 40 States, with law-abiding citizens using them for lawful purposes such as self-defense, target shooting, and hunting,” the government said.
“Legislatures may not ban arms in common use among law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”
Hellbound and Down 