High Court Lets Connecticut, New York Assault Weapons Bans Stand

“The lower court’s decision in this case was particularly indefensible, as the unconstitutionality of Connecticut’s ban follows directly from the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Heller”.

The eight justices declined to hear two separate appeals brought by gun rights advocates, leaving in place earlier rulings that said the laws were compliant with the Second Amendment, Reuters reported.

The state’s attorney general said he too is pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the challenge to Connecticut’s assault weapon ban.

The U.S. Supreme Court could have used the legal challenge to Connecticut’s law banning many semiautomatic weapons to firmly establish the constitutionally of such restrictions.

“Military-style assault weapons have no place in our schools or on our streets”, Murphy said. But seven states, including Maryland, California, and Hawaii, and several cities and towns have enacted such laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to assault weapons bans in NY and CT on Monday. The court denied the appeal with no comment or recorded vote. In Heller, the Court ruled (correctly) that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a firearm, though it only applied to federal enclaves. “We really can’t take much away from that other than to say that at this time the court did not see much of a justification to involve itself in the dispute”, Owen said.

“Connecticut dubs a semi-automatic firearm an ‘assault weapon, ‘ but that is nothing more than argument advanced by a political slogan in the guise of a definition”, the group wrote to Supreme Court.

After a fairly good run for the Second Amendment over the past decade and more, we’ve been seeing signs that the Supreme Court lacks the interest or conviction to tackle some of the big questions surrounding gun rights in America.

Following the massacre of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, Murphy launched a filibuster on the Senate floor demanding a Senate response to the shootings.

Kampfer, a Fulton County resident, argued in part that the state shouldn’t be allowed to prohibit the sale of new semiautomatic firearms if prior owners of the weapons were allowed to keep them, like the SAFE Act allowed. Congress has repeatedly rejected a renewal of this ban on assault rifles, most recently defeating a proposed ban in 2013.

Gov. Cuomo signed a series of gun control measures, including an assault weapons ban, into law in January 2013, making NY the first state to take action in the wake of Newtown.

In the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, the Senate was taking up gun legislation on Monday, although the four measures were not expected to win passage. “Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons”.