The Supreme Court has accepted two cases challenging assault weapons bans in Illinois and Connecticut, setting the stage for what could be the most consequential Second Amendment showdown since the landmark Bruen ruling in 2022.
The justices agreed to hear Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins in the upcoming term, with oral arguments projected for late 2026 or early 2027. Both cases take direct aim at state laws that ban broad categories of semi-automatic firearms, Illinois prohibits 100 specific models, including semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines, while Connecticut's list covers 70. The court now faces a question it has circled for years: whether the Second Amendment protects the right of Americans to own the most widely held rifles in the country.
Gun rights advocates see the pair of cases as a natural extension of the court's recent trajectory. In 2022, the Bruen decision struck down New York's concealed carry law and established that governments must produce historical analogues, not just rational policy arguments, to justify restricting firearm rights. Two years later, in Rahimi v. United States, the court upheld a federal ban on gun possession by individuals under domestic violence restraining orders. And just last term, in U.S. v. Hemani, the justices struck down a federal law barring controlled substance users from owning firearms, rejecting historical comparisons to laws that disarmed public drunkards.
Each ruling sharpened the Bruen test. Now the court will apply it to the broadest category of firearms regulation that blue-state legislatures have enacted, the assault weapons ban.
The Supreme Court is not acting in a vacuum. In July, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down New Jersey's ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, ruling it unconstitutional under the Bruen framework. That decision applied to the entire class of banned semi-automatic rifles, not just specific models like the Colt AR-15.
Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, the organization behind both Viramontes and Grant, called the Third Circuit ruling a validation of the arguments his group will press before the justices:
"Today's Third Circuit decision striking down New Jersey's so-called 'assault weapons' ban confirms arguments in SAF's two cases before the Supreme Court are valid and well-reasoned."
The ripple effects could be enormous. Close to a dozen states, including New York, California, and New Jersey, maintain similar assault weapons bans. A Supreme Court ruling that these laws fail the Bruen test would force legislatures across the country to rewrite their firearms statutes. As one legal commentator wrote in the Washington Examiner, the case "will leave as the next Heller, or the next Bruen, or the case a dozen state legislatures spend next spring rewriting their laws around."
Roughly 32 million AR-15-style rifles are currently in civilian hands across the United States, a number that bears directly on the "common use" standard the Supreme Court established in District of Columbia v. Heller. If a firearm is in common use for lawful purposes, the government faces a steep burden to justify banning it.
Legal analysts who follow the Second Amendment closely say the court's recent decisions have been building toward this moment, and that observers who expected the justices to retreat from Bruen misread the signals. Haley Proctor, a law professor at Notre Dame, told Just the News that the Rahimi decision in 2024, which upheld a narrower firearm restriction, led some commentators astray:
"I think that led many people to misread Rahimi as yet another course correction as the court backing away from the Bruen test in favor of a somewhat flexible principles-based approach to the Second Amendment."
Proctor pointed to the Hemani ruling as proof the court had not softened. In that case, the justices rejected the government's attempt to compare modern drug users to historical-era drunkards who were stripped of civic rights. The analogy failed, Proctor explained, because the historical purpose was entirely different:
"Their 'why' was different: protecting the assets of historical drunkards from dissipation of assets instead of protecting the community from violence."
That distinction matters for the assault weapons cases. States defending their bans will need to produce historical analogues that match not just the form of a restriction but its underlying justification. The conservative direction of the current court suggests a majority is unlikely to accept loose comparisons.
Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, framed the standard the court should apply as a middle ground, but one that still demands real historical grounding:
"Courts should neither uphold every modern law that remotely resembles a historical analogue, nor require the government to produce a historical twin or dead ringer for the modern law."
One of the sharpest questions the court will confront is how states define the firearms they prohibit. Connecticut bans 70 specific models. Illinois bans 100, sweeping in any semi-automatic weapon with a detachable magazine. Analysts say that breadth creates a constitutional vulnerability.
Michael Williams, general counsel at the American Suppressor Association, argued that the Hemani ruling exposed the danger of laws that strip rights from broad categories of people, or, by extension, ban broad categories of commonly owned property, without individualized findings of danger:
"If Congress were allowed to create out-groups that had no real relationship to whether an individualized finding that a person is or could be violent, that's a pretty bad slippery slope."
Williams was blunt about the scope of the Illinois and Connecticut bans. When a state prohibits 100 firearms at once, including an entire class defined by a single mechanical feature, the constitutional math gets harder to defend.
"When the grouping is this broad, it's a no-go for the court."
The court will also need to clarify what features make a firearm subject to the Bruen test at all, magazine capacity, stock type, rate of fire, or some combination. That question has divided lower courts and produced inconsistent rulings across circuits. The intra-court tensions visible in recent terms suggest the justices themselves may not agree on a single framework, but the direction of travel has been clear.
Justice Clarence Thomas, for his part, has not been subtle. He wrote separately in a prior case that he would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America. The court's decision to grant review in both Viramontes and Grant suggests at least four justices shared his impatience.
For all the uncertainty about how the justices will rule, Williams offered an assessment grounded in the court's own record. The Bruen test survived Rahimi. It drove the outcome in Hemani. And the court took up Wolford v. Lopez last term in a case described as directly addressing the Bruen framework, though that case's outcome has not been reported.
Asked about the upcoming assault weapons cases, Williams acknowledged the difficulty of prediction but pointed to a pattern:
"It's tough to predict how the Supreme Court would take that, but so far the court has been pretty serious about insisting through its opinions that it was serious about Bruen."
That pattern should concern every state legislature that passed an assault weapons ban on the assumption that courts would defer to policy arguments about public safety. The Bruen test does not ask whether a law is good policy. It asks whether the restriction has a historical analogue in the American tradition of firearm regulation. For bans covering 70 or 100 firearms at a stroke, that is a hard test to pass.
With a vetted shortlist ready should a vacancy arise, the conservative legal infrastructure around the Second Amendment is deeper than it has been in a generation. And with lower courts already striking down state bans under Bruen, the Supreme Court is not stepping into uncharted territory, it is following a trail its own precedents blazed.
Some state courts have signaled they may resist. A Hawaii Supreme Court justice declared that his state would chart its own constitutional path on gun rights, regardless of what the Roberts Court decides. That kind of defiance only sharpens the stakes of the cases now on the docket.
For decades, blue-state legislatures treated assault weapons bans as settled law. The Supreme Court is about to remind them that the Constitution, not legislative preference, settles what rights Americans keep.
