Why won’t the Supreme Court enforce its Second Amendment precedents?

So called “assault weapons,” including particularly AR-15s and similar lightweight semi-automatic rifles, have long been the target of gun control legislation. As I have explained in the past, the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller should have put a stop to such legislation, but it didn’t. Many states, including Maryland, enacted new laws banning assault weapons in the years after Heller, and—in open defiance of the precedents established in Heller and in subsequent cases—many federal courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, have upheld those laws.

In Snope v. Brown, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision upholding the assault weapons ban, but in a disappointing decision handed down yesterday, it declined to do so. In a statement attached the decision, Justice Kavanaugh said:

Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decision making on the AR–15 issue. 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.

That’s some comfort, I suppose, but I agree with Clarence Thomas, who said in his dissent:

For more information see: Fourth Circuit Continues to Defy Supreme Court over Maryland’s Assault Weapons Ban

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