Supreme Court allows Maryland’s AR-15 gun ban to remain

The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a challenge to Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban, allowing the state’s sweeping prohibition on the possession or sale of the popular AR-15-style rifle to remain in place.

The justices also refused to hear a case challenging Rhode Island’s ban on selling or possessing magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Gun rights advocates had been pleading with the justices to take the Maryland case. They said it was time for a definitive ruling about AR-style rifles and how they fit into the court’s direction in recent years on gun rights.

Some justices indicated that the issue would return soon and Maryland’s law could fall.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, a longtime Maryland resident who sided with colleagues in declining to hear the case, signaled that he was waiting for other lower courts to grapple with the issue but said Maryland’s ban and the lower court ruling upholding it were “questionable.”

“Although the court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review,” he said in a statement. “Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this court shortly and, in my view, this court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next term or two.”

Tens of millions of AR-15s are in circulation, and they are legal in more than 40 states. States that purport to ban the weapons are relative outliers.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they thought the court should have taken up this case.

Justice Thomas said that as long as the justices leave the issue undecided, the federal government could step in and issue a nationwide ban on AR-15s by deciding they are too close to machine guns.

“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” he said. “We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”

The issue is whether semiautomatic weapons, defined as each trigger pull firing a round, can be considered too close to automatic weapons, or machine guns, which can produce a constant stream of fire once the trigger is pulled.

Automatic weapons have generally been deemed to fall outside the guarantees of the Second Amendment, but some courts, citing various reasons, have upheld bans on some types of semiautomatic weapons.

Maryland adopted its ban in 2013 after a wave of mass shootings.

It covers not only the AR-15 but also the AK-47 and a .50 caliber rifle, all of which the state said were “assault weapons” and thus “dangerous and unusual.” The Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment does not protect dangerous and unusual weapons.

In a forceful opinion last year, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the state’s law.

“It is but another example of a state regulating excessively dangerous weapons once their incompatibility with a lawful and safe society becomes apparent, while nonetheless preserving avenues for armed self-defense,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee.

In an epic rant about guns, he said the AR-15 is too dangerous to treat as a normal gun.

“For these reasons, we decline to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes,” he wrote.

Justice Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee to the high court, said it’s tough to square an AR-15 ban with the court’s rulings in recent years.

He said the Bruen ruling established that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to arms and that any bans must be the sort that the nation’s founders would have countenanced.

He said an AR-15 is a quintessential type of “arms” as envisioned by the Second Amendment and there is no sense that the founders would have thought a ban on the most popular rifle in America was constitutional.

Because AR-15s are semiautomatic weapons, their basic functionality is similar to that of a handgun or target shooting rifle. Each round fired requires another pull of the trigger.

Judge Wilkinson said what puts AR-15s into constitutionally unprotected territory is that they began as military-style rifles, closely associated with the M16. They have a similar muzzle velocity and range and can be fitted with pistol grips and large-capacity magazines, which Judge Wilkinson said make them “combat-functional.”

He said that makes the automatic-semiautomatic debate inconsequential. However, he pointed out that it’s relatively easy to convert the AR-15 into something like an automatic weapon through illegal add-ons such as bump stocks.

“All this is a far cry from any notion of civilian self-defense,” he wrote.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, says that in addition to Maryland, Washington, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Delaware have assault weapon bans that cover AR-15s.

So does the District of Columbia.

Everytown said 14 states ban high-capacity magazines, generally defined as more than 10 rounds, though some states have different definitions.

They overlap the AR-15 states, with the additions of Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and Rhode Island.

Maryland’s case is Snope v. Brown. David Snope is a Maryland resident who wants to buy an AR-15. Anthony Brown is the state’s attorney general.

The Second Amendment Foundation said the court’s decision not to hear the case was an “egregious error.”

“Millions of Americans continue to be disenfranchised from exercising their complete Second Amendment rights by virtue of these categorical bans,” said Adam Kraut, the group’s executive director.