The Supreme Court will consider in the term that begins in October whether state and local laws that ban semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 are unconstitutional, the court announced on Tuesday.
The court announced that it had accepted two cases filed by prospective gun owners that challenge a local ban on assault rifles in Cook County, Ill., and a state ban in Connecticut.
The court accepted the cases on the last day of the term that began in October 2025, as the justices began to look ahead to their work in the fall.
The weapons are well-liked among gun enthusiasts — one of the petitioners quoted a 2025 Supreme Court opinion that calls the AR-15 “the most popular rifle in the country.” But they have also frequently been used by the perpetrators of mass shootings. The Connecticut law was passed in response to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 children as young as 6, and six adults. The shooter used an AR-15 style rifle and large capacity magazines, firing 154 rounds in less than five minutes.
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted similar restrictions.
The court expanded gun rights in two cases in the term that concluded on Tuesday. In one, the court struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission before carrying a firearm onto private property that is generally open to the public. In the other, the court narrowed a federal law that banned drug users and addicts from owning or possessing guns.
In the filings to the Supreme Court about the cases the court accepted on Tuesday, gun rights organizations urged the justices to invalidate the assault weapons bans, saying the issue is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country who use the firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense, target shooting and hunting. They argued that the weapons’ ubiquity bolsters the case for Second Amendment protections, pointing to a 2008 precedent that only “dangerous and unusual” weapons were historically subject to prohibitions.
In their own filing, Connecticut officials countered that the Second Amendment does not prevent states from banning particularly dangerous weapons that are “neither used nor useful for self-defense just because manufacturers flood the market.”
Last year, the Supreme Court turned down a challenge to a similar Maryland law. That prompted objections from three conservative justices.
A fourth justice, Brett M. Kavanaugh, who could have supplied the vote needed to add the case to the court’s docket, issued a statement at the time saying the court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next term or two” after lower courts had an opportunity to rule on additional disputes.
The Supreme Court first recognized an individual right to keep firearms in the home for self-defense in 2008. The petitioners in the new cases ask the court to apply its more recent test for evaluating constitutional challenges to gun restrictions, as laid out in a 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, the justices said laws must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Two years ago, the Supreme Court limited the sweep of its Bruen decision when it ruled that the government can disarm people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence. Only Justice Thomas, the author of the majority opinion in Bruen, dissented.
In the Illinois case accepted by the court on Tuesday, gun owners and organizations said a ban on automatic rifles in Cook County is inconsistent with the Constitution’s promise that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
County officials defended their restrictions, citing evidence that “assault rifles are the weapon of choice for criminals and terrorists set on quickly massacring innocents, but are rarely put to lawful public use.”
In a statement, the Firearms Policy Coalition, a pro-gun nonprofit advocacy group that helped bring the Illinois lawsuit, said it would press to “eliminate bans on so-called ‘assault weapons’” across the country. “Now is the time has come to march forward and reclaim the rights that were immorally taken from us,” the group said.
Janet Carter, a managing director at Everytown Law, a nonprofit that supports gun control, said in a statement that AR-15-style rifles were “the weapons of choice for mass shooters.”
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