The case from Maryland was the court’s latest opportunity to apply its recently announced history-based test for assessing the constitutionality of gun control laws.
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would not hear a major Second Amendment challenge to a Maryland law banning semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15. As is the court’s practice, its brief order gave no reasons.
The move, over the objections of three conservative justices, let the ban stand and reflected the court’s intermittent engagement with gun rights. It has issued only three significant Second Amendment decisions since recognizing an individual right to own guns in 2008.
The Maryland law was enacted in 2013 in response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut the previous year. It banned many semiautomatic rifles and imposed a 10-round limit on gun magazines.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should have considered the question, which the justices have repeatedly declined to resolve.
“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” he wrote. “That question is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country. We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”
He added that the court’s commitment to the Second Amendment was inadequate.
“I doubt we would sit idly by if lower courts were to so subvert our precedents involving any other constitutional right,” he wrote. “Until we are vigilant in enforcing it, the right to bear arms will remain ‘a second-class right.’”
