SCOTUS Won’t Hear Challenge to CT Assault Weapons Ban

The court declined to hear a constitutional challenge by gun rights advocates of an earlier federal appeals court ruling in October protecting bans on assault-style weapons in NY and Connecticut, VICE News reported.

“After numerous challenges by the gun industry, the Supreme Court has rejected appeals that an assault weapon ban is an assault on Second Amendment rights”.

Both New York and Connecticut’s assault weapons bans were enacted in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

The military-style rifles banned in CT were back in the news last week after the gunman in an Orlando nightclub shooting that left 49 dead – the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history – used a similar type of weapon.

The nation’s highest court on Monday declined to take up a challenge to Connecticut’s 2013 assault weapon ban expansion rushed through in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. Congressional Republicans and some Democrats, backed by the influential National Rifle Association gun rights lobby, foiled efforts to restore it.

In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semi-automatic rifles.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a statement saying, “This decision is a victory for common sense gun control laws in ny and across the nation”. It should be a demonstration to states across the nation that common sense gun laws not only work – they are constitutional. “CT stands with states across the country that have implemented similar gun violence prevention measures”, Blumenthal said in a statement on Monday.

Some of the families of the victims of the Newtown mass shooting are not calling for a ban of the type of weapon Adam Lanza used to murder their … “We can not sit idly by and watch tragedy after tragedy, horror after horror”, Malloy said.

“The overwhelming majority of responsible gun owners want reasonable and effective gun control legislation”, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said.

Murphy, who filibustered for nearly 15 hours to get a Republican response to gun control measures, said “military-style assault weapons have no place in our schools or on our streets”. Mr. Wilson suggested that the Court’s decision to decline review may have been influenced by the recent, unfortunate death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the author if the Heller decision.

The challengers, who lost in the lower courts, said the ban violates the Second Amendment right to own a gun.

“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.

They criticized lower-court decisions that have allowed jurisdictions to impose what Thomas called “categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes”.

The Connecticut law lists 183 specific prohibited weapons. “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.

He hailed the Supreme Court’s move, which he said “validated” the bipartisan legislation, which remains controversial in pockets of upstate NY.

While “gun rights” supporters are still calling for clarification regarding the Heller decision that they hope will identify assault rifle bans as unconstitutional, as they did in Shew v. Malloy in 2014, Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun violence, is very pleased with SCOTUS’s Monday decision.

Malloy and Jepsen also slammed congressional inaction on gun control.