Supreme Court Turns Away Challenge to Connecticut Ban on Semiautomatic Weapons

Supreme Court Turns Away Challenge to Connecticut Ban on Semiautomatic Weapons

By ADAM LIPTAK
JUNE 20, 2016

link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/supreme-court-gun-control-semiautomatic-connecticut.html

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a Connecticut law banning many semiautomatic rifles. The law, enacted in 2013 in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., made it a crime to sell or possess the firearms, which critics call assault weapons.

The decision not to hear the case, not long after the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., does not set a Supreme Court precedent. But it is part of a trend in which the justices have given at least tacit approval to broad gun-control laws in states and localities that choose to enact them.

The case, Shew v. Malloy, No.15-1030, was brought by four individuals, a business and two advocacy groups. They said the ban was irrational, ineffective and unconstitutional.

“Connecticut dubs a semiautomatic firearm” with one of several common features “an ‘assault weapon,’ but that is nothing more than an argument advanced by a political slogan in the guise of a definition,” they told the Supreme Court in their petition seeking review.

In October, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, upheld the ban almost entirely. It acknowledged that the affected weapons were in common use and assumed their possession was protected by the Second Amendment. But the appeals court ruled that the Connecticut law passed constitutional muster.

The law was “specifically targeted to prevent mass shootings like that in Newtown, in which the shooter used a semiautomatic assault weapon,” Judge José A. Cabranes wrote for the court.

“Plaintiffs complain that mass shootings are ‘particularly rare events’ and thus, even if successful, the legislation will have a ‘minimal impact’ on most violent crime.

“That may be so,” Judge Cabranes continued. “But gun-control legislation ‘need not strike at all evils at the same time’ to be constitutional.”

The Supreme Court also turned down on Monday a challenge to a similar New York law in Kampfer v. Cuomo, No. 15-8704. It was filed by Douglas E. Kampfer, a New York resident who had litigated the case without a lawyer. The Second Circuit denied his appeal in a brief order in March.

It has been eight years since the Supreme Court recognized an individual right to keep guns at home for self-defense in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down parts of an exceptionally strict local law. Since then, the justices have said almost nothing about the scope of that right.

When the court rejected a Second Amendment case in December from a Chicago suburb, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, dissented. They accused the majority of abdicating its responsibility to enforce the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. (Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the Heller case, which was decided by a 5-to-4 vote.)

“Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles,” Justice Thomas wrote.

“The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting,” Justice Thomas added. “Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.”