The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it won’t hear a case challenging the right of cities to ban semi-automatic weapon, including those with high capacity magazines, a major blow to Second Amendment advocates who are pushing for the weapons to be legalized nationwide.
Highland Park, Ill., gun regulations prohibit selling, buying, and possessing semi-automatic guns, which rules out the popular AR-15, Scotus Blog reports. The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller that a federal law banning gun ownership in your own home was unconstitutional, a ruling applied to all state and local governments in 2010. The high court’s 2008 ruling confirmed Americans’ right to have a gun in their home for self-defense, but the details of how far that can go are still largely decided by state and local governments, whose laws vary widely.
The question is particularly heated after recent mass shootings. The shootings have drawn strong scrutiny of gun laws, with The New York Times running a notable front page editorial calling for more regulation, a sentiment echoed in President Barack Obama’s televised address Sunday night.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago upheld Highland Park’s ordinance in April.
“A ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines might not prevent shootings in Highland Park (where they are already rare), but it may reduce the carnage if a mass shooting occurs,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for the majority in the Chicago decision. But he also said that if the ban decreased “the perceived risk from a mass shooting, and makes the public feel safer as a result, that’s a substantial benefit.”
Most of the justices declined to take up the case except for Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who say they are frustrated with the highest court in the land treating the Second Amendment like a “second class right.”
“The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting,” Thomas writes. “Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.”
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