A Landmark Second Amendment Showdown Is Coming For more than a decade, lower courts have wrestled with a question the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to answer: can states and cities ban AR-15-style rifles and other semiautomatic weapons often labeled "assault weapons"? That era of avoidance just ended. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in two consolidated cases — Viramontes v. Cook County (out of the Seventh Circuit) and Grant v. Higgins (out of the Second Circu …

Something unusual is happening at One First Street in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Supreme Court has been holding several major "hardware-ban" cases on its conference docket for months — refusing to either accept them for full review or turn them away. For gun rights advocates, constitutional law scholars, and millions of Americans living under state-level AR-15 bans, the silence is anything but quiet. It's the loudest signal the Court has sent on the Second Amendment since Bruen. What Is a …