The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to Maryland’s assault weapons ban.
The justices rejected Kolbe v. Hogan, involving petitioners questioning the constitutionality of Maryland’s assault weapons ban and whether semiautomatic rifles and magazines were excluded from Second Amendment protection under previous precedent from the high court.
Maryland residents and gun groups, with the support of the National Rifle Association, petitioned the high court to hear its challenge of the ban with the hope that Supreme Court precedent would hand them another win.
The petitioners wanted the justices to strike down the assault weapons ban in a similar fashion to how the justices decided District of Columbia v. Heller, a 5-4 opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia eliminating D.C.’s handgun ban in 2008.
“Maryland has banned the most popular semiautomatic rifles and magazines — arms that are indisputably in common use for self-defense — from the homes of its law-abiding citizens,” the petitioners argued. “This Court recognized and protected [in Heller] the principle at the heart of the interests enshrined by the Second Amendment: The individual — and not the government — retains the right to choose from among common arms those that they believe will best protect their person, family, and home.”
The justices also decided on Monday not to hear a challenge to Florida’s concealed carry restrictions regarding firearms. Dale Lee Norman was charged with violating the Sunshine State’s concealed carry restrictions in 2012 and challenged the law in Florida courts. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed lower courts’ rulings against Norman and upheld the state’s concealed carry restrictions.
The Supreme Court’s decision to punt on two cases about the protections afforded to gun owners by the 2nd Amendment follows a spate of recent mass shootings. The most recent mass shooting came in October 2017, when a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
A gunman slaughtered 49 people in June 2016 in Orlando, Florida, the state producing one of the challenges rejected by the high court on Monday.
The Orlando killer used a weapon of the sort challenged in the Maryland case, which the Supreme Court justices rejected on Monday. The justices made no mention of the mass shootings in their denial of the cases challenging gun restrictions from Maryland and Florida.
