On Monday, the United States Supreme Court refused two appeals from Connecticut and New York that asked for assault-weapons ban laws in those states to be reconsidered.
Without comment, the eight Justices denied the appeals in Shew v. Malloy (the Connecticut case) and Kampfer v. Cuomo (the New York case), which involved gun-control laws passed after the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, mass shootings.
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The Connecticut law focuses on the sale or possession of semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines and other features. It banned nearly 200 types of weapons. The New York law is similar.
The Court denied a similar appeal back in December 2015 when Justice Antonin Scalia was still sitting on the bench, in the case of Friedman v. City of Highland Park. The Court also didn’t explain its reasoning in turning aside the Highland Park case, and its denial didn’t create any new precedent on assault-weapon laws outside of the area of the Seventh Circuit Court.
A total of seven states and a few cities now have similar bans on the books, and so far none of those has been struck down in a final ruling, although a ban enacted in Maryland has been under a constitutional cloud because of a federal appeals court’s initial reaction to it. In the Maryland case, a three-judge panel upheld using a strict constitutional test favored by gun-rights activist. A full court is considering that test in an appeal.
