The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a challenge to the legality of state restrictions on assault-style rifles, giving the justices another chance to expand gun rights in a case that involves a type of weapon often associated with mass shootings.
The justices took up two appeals after lower courts upheld bans in Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut on powerful semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s. The lower courts rejected arguments that the measures violate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October. The court separately on Tuesday rejected a series of appeals challenging federal and state bans on handgun purchases by people ages 18 to 20.
In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence including numerous mass shootings, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, often has taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment.
Challengers to the restrictions on assault-style rifles have said that Supreme Court precedents concerning the Second Amendment protect these firearms, which they described as in “common use.”
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The Second Amendment Foundation gun rights group, one of the challengers, welcomed the court’s willingness to take up the matter.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, called the state’s ban “lawful, lifesaving and broadly supported.”
“The gun lobby has flooded the courts in states across the country to get an assault weapons case up to this Supreme Court,” Tong said. “We are prepared for this fight, and we are going to go in with everything we’ve got to keep these weapons of war off our streets, out of our schools and away from our families.”
COOK COUNTY POLICY
Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, first enacted an assault-style weapons ordinance in 1993. The current law bans many similar semiautomatic rifles, including the AR-15 and AK-47.
Cook County said it has long been known that assault-style rifles are the preferred tool for mass shooters. They are “the weapon of choice for criminals and terrorists set on quickly massacring innocents,” county lawyers said, citing numerous examples in court papers of their use, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a presidential campaign rally in 2024.
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“The AR-15 also has the same destructive capacity as weapons developed for use in wartime offensives by the military,” county lawyers said, noting assault-style rifles are far more lethal than handguns.
The challengers, the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation gun rights groups and two of their members who seek to own assault-style rifles, sued in 2021.
The plaintiffs describe the AR-15 as a “perfectly ordinary and common” rifle. They say the term “assault weapon” is a political slogan designed to exploit public misunderstanding about the difference between semiautomatic and fully automatic firearms.
The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the county in 2025.
