After striking down laws in California and other states that restricted carrying firearms in stores and businesses, the Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a case that could overturn California’s ban on guns defined as assault weapons, including many AR-15-style and other semiautomatic rifles.
On the last day of their 2025-26 term, the justices granted review of a challenge to similar laws in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois, prohibiting the possession and sale of AR-15-style rifles and other military-style guns, which have been used in numerous mass shootings. The bans largely target semiautomatic rifles, owned by millions of Americans, which fire a bullet and load a new round with each trigger pull.
California is not a party to the case, but a ruling overturning the laws would also apply to the state’s pioneering assault weapons ban. California bars variations of the AR-15 and the AK-47. It allows semiautomatic rifles with fixed magazines that hold no more than 10 rounds, but those with detachable magazines, enabling swift reloading, can’t have features such as folding stocks and pistol grips.
A federal judge in San Diego ruled the California law unconstitutional in 2023, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals quickly issued an order allowing the state to continue enforcing the ban while the case continued.
“Every assault weapons ban is at risk if that (Cook County) law is struck down, including California’s,” said John Donohue, a Stanford law professor who filed arguments supporting the gun ban. He said he was “praying the Supreme Court will not make a monumental mistake in striking them down since the empirical evidence shows that these laws do restrain mass shootings.”
But in a filing with the Supreme Court seeking review of a ruling upholding that law, David Thompson, an attorney for gun owners and sellers, wrote that the AR-15-style rifle is “the most popular long gun in the country” and is “the modern descendant of the rifles that were borne by the militiamen of the Revolution and the pioneers who struck out West in search of a better life.”
Another firearms advocate, San Diego attorney C.D. Michel, told the Chronicle that the deciding issue in the case should be whether such weapons are in “common use.” The Supreme Court ruled in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision that the Second Amendment protects the right to own firearms that are “in common use at the time” and those “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, like self-defense.”
The court had the Cook County and Connecticut cases on its docket for nearly a year without taking action until Tuesday, when a majority of the justices voted to hear them in the term that starts in October.
Last week the court overturned a Hawaii law that prohibited taking firearms onto private property such as stores unless the owner posted a “Guns Allowed” sign. The 6-3 ruling by Justice Samuel Alito said the law violates “the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense” and applied the decision to similar laws in California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
It was the latest in a series of rulings against firearms restrictions since 2022, when the same 6-3 majority said Americans have a constitutional right to carry concealed firearms in public. In that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas said any limits on gun possession or sales must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation,” dating back to the nation’s founding.
The court appeared to move in a different direction two years ago, however, in an 8-1 ruling, upholding federal and state laws that prohibit gun ownership by domestic abusers who have attacked or threatened someone in their household. Thomas cast the only dissenting vote.
The current cases are Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, and Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566.
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This article originally published at Supreme Court agrees to hear case that could overturn California’s assault weapons ban.