Supreme Court takes up challenges to AR-15 bans

Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it will consider whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to have AR-15-style rifles.

In a brief order, the high court agreed to take up a pair of cases challenging local and state laws outlawing AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles. One involves an ordinance in Cook County, Illinois, and the other centers on Connecticut’s law.

The justices will hear arguments in the cases in its next term, which begins in October.

The cases are the first in which the high court will weigh the legality of laws restricting access to certain types of firearms. In a landmark 2022 decision, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry a gun in public for self defense. But the justices had — until now — declined to take up challenges involving bans on AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles in Illinois and Maryland, leaving the laws in place.

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Supreme Court’s Wolford Decision Could Blow A Hole In New Jersey’s AR-15 Ban Defense

The Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez was about Hawaii’s attempt to turn most private property open to the public into gun-free zones by default. But the ruling may have just handed gun owners in New Jersey a powerful new weapon in the fight against the state’s ban on so-called “assault firearms.”

On June 26, attorneys for the Cheeseman plaintiffs in Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs v. Attorney General notified the Third Circuit that Wolford directly affects the pending challenge to New Jersey’s semiautomatic firearm ban.

Their point is simple: New Jersey cannot force gun owners to prove at the starting line that banned firearms are “in common use” before the Second Amendment even applies. Under Wolford, the first question is much more basic.

Does the law regulate “Arms”? If yes, the Constitution is already in play.

 

Wolford Reaffirms The Plain Text Test

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court in Wolford, explained that Bruen’s first step asks whether the law falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text. That includes whether the law concerns “Arms,” meaning weapons “customarily used for offensive or defensive purposes,” according to the Court.

Phrasing matters. The Second Amendment does not protect only whatever gun a state lawyer is willing to admit is useful for home defense. It does not protect only handguns. It does not protect only muskets. It protects “Arms.” And Wolford confirms that the category includes weapons customarily used for offensive or defensive purposes. That is a problem for New Jersey.

That matters in Cheeseman because New Jersey’s ban plainly regulates firearms. Not accessories. Not conduct divorced from arms. Firearms.

The Cheeseman letter seizes on that language, telling the Third Circuit that “the only predicate question” is whether the law concerns “Arms.” The plaintiffs argue that the answer is “beyond dispute,” meaning the Second Amendment presumptively protects possession of the banned firearms. From there, the burden shifts to New Jersey.

That is the part anti-gun states hate. They want gun owners trapped in a never-ending preliminary debate over whether AR-15s, modern semiautomatic rifles, and similar arms are common enough, useful enough, or favored enough by judges to count. Wolford makes that harder.

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Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. The right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to always be possible. — Sen. Hubert Humphrey, 1960

Why Black Codes Shouldn’t Be Viewed as Legal Precedent

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took an interesting position in her Wolford dissent. In it, she actually argued that measures enacted prior to the 14th Amendment, which were meant to disarm black Americans following the Civil War, should be viewed as constitutional, if for no other reason than they didn’t explicitly say they just applied to black people.

But the thing is, we all know what they were about.

Cam hit on that on Thursday shortly after the decision came down.

Over at The National Review, Dan McLaughlin also had thoughts about the inane commentary from Jackson.

Jackson writes this as if she is completely oblivious to both the cause-and-effect relationship between the Black Codes and the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the fact that states could violate the Second Amendment with impunity before 1868 because until then it only bound the federal government. (Of course, nearly all such states had their own state constitutional guarantees, but Jackson just blows past the distinction.)

The 14th Amendment problem with these laws is not just that they would be struck down as racially discriminatory; it’s that even race-neutral laws that aimed to restrict the rights of freed black Southerners were a big reason the Republican Congress went beyond banning race discrimination and included within Section 1 of the 14th Amendment much broader guarantees against states stripping their citizens of rights. In 1865, Louisiana could ban guns or speech without violating federal law; in 1868, it could not.

Also, the fact that the laws were discriminatory in intent, often discriminatory on their face, regionally particular, broke with how white men were regulated across the country, and flew in the face of prior practice, are certainly all reasons to consider them a poor representative of an established, nationwide tradition. (Jackson cites the opinions of Daniel Sickles, but Sickles’ views of gun rights were hardly consistent, given that he shot the U.S. attorney for D.C. to death in the street for sleeping with his wife.)

The race discrimination isn’t merely an embarrassing footnote; it’s in many cases a sign that laws were being imposed on the minority that the majority would not have tolerated and did not tolerate in states without large populations of newly freed slaves. In the case of the 1865 Louisiana law cited by Katyal, it should be noted that putting the burden of applying the law on the decision of a private actor (the property owner) was fairly clearly a way of ensuring that it could be applied in discriminatory fashion.

It would be a different story if these were widely adopted laws that were also used by racists for racist reasons. There are many such cases. But the Black Codes were such a prominent part of Hawaii’s argument here because there were so few other straws to grasp.

And let’s be real here, while Jackson seems to think that because they weren’t explicitly racist, and because they weren’t overturned at the time by the courts of the era, they’re somehow an acceptable analog that should be used.

However, the whole idea of historic analogs from Bruen wasn’t about looking for the laws that might have prompted the 14th Amendment–one of the two eras Bruen tells judges to look at for analogs–but that were considered constitutional afterward.

To my knowledge, there were no cases that expressly upheld the law prohibiting carrying a firearm on plantation property without permission following the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

McLaughlin quotes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why. The Black Codes were enacted to subordinate newly freed slaves. Hawaii obviously does not contend that its law promotes an analogous interest. So it’s law, and the default rules in the Black Codes are not relevantly similar.” She also notes that most would be happy to know that their law isn’t considered racist, unlike the Black Codes.

The important distinction here is that the Black Codes, particularly this one, were purely about disarming black Americans. They were racist on the surface and were only about empowering racism. In that way, they were no different than poll taxes and land ownership requirements for voting registration. They were created explicitly to limit the rights of freed slaves who were, at this time, American citizens.

When the only measures you can find that justify your preferred policies are inherently racist, most of us would take a step back and wonder exactly what the hell we’re doing with ourselves. Hawaii, and anti-gunners as a group, have no such self-awareness. They simply push the idea that laws which were unconstitutional because of how they targeted particular people at the time, as if that shouldn’t matter.

I honestly don’t see how either Hawaii’s attorneys or these two justices were able to look at themselves in the mirror for believing such blatantly racist measures were totally fine precedents for curtailing the rights of others.

It’s like looking at Ted Bundy as a role model for how to talk to girls.

American universities’ Chinese Students and Scholars Associations are Communist Party’s foreign missions in disguise.

‘At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.’

Erik Durneika Opinion Editor

China is aggressively expanding its influence operations across the United States, with higher education acting as a major conduit for such malign activity. Most attention has been focused on U.S. universities accepting Chinese funding and China-linked researchers receiving taxpayer money. However, there’s another aspect of Chinese infiltration that deserves more attention: Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs).

There are 150 CSSA chapters at colleges and universities across the country. Though they appear to be harmless cultural groups at first glance, these organizations play a central role in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) united front work, which aims to monitor Chinese students abroad, stifle any form of opposition to the regime, and co-opt individuals who aren’t affiliated with the party.

CSSA constitutions, websites, and members reveal that Chinese consulates supervise and provide direct support to these groups. For example, the University of Connecticut CSSA chapter’s website says that it is an “official Chinese association supported by the Consulate General of the P.R. China in New York,” while the University of Michigan CSSA’s constitution states that it is accredited by the Chinese consulate in Chicago.

And in a Chinese social media post that has since been deleted, the University of Pittsburgh’s CSSA apparently admitted to receiving $6,000 per year from the Chinese consulate. These associations are doing as much as possible to obfuscate their ties to the CCP.

 

 

So, what’s at stake? First, and perhaps most immediately apparent, academic freedom and free speech.

There are countless instances of CSSAs censoring and intimidating students, researchers, and groups that challenge Beijing’s propaganda machine — a CSSA member assaulting an anti-CCP student protester at a Harvard University event, Columbia University canceling a human rights panel after CSSA backlash, a group of Chinese students disrupting a Brandeis University virtual event, and Chinese students taunting an Uyghur student speaker at Cornell University.

This type of behavior is a direct assault on our national sovereignty and seeks to create an environment of fear, all while pushing Beijing’s narrative. But I’d expect nothing less from America’s top adversary that operates in the gray zone, below the threshold of armed conflict.

These groups also pose a threat to U.S. national security. They act as another channel through which Beijing can recruit and mobilize Chinese nationals to steal intellectual property and sensitive information to aid its military buildup, which has accelerated in recent years. Intellectual property theft costs the U.S. economy anywhere from $400 billion to $600 billion per year, with China being the primary offender.

The response from American higher education to Chinese malfeasance through these associations has been abysmal and outright infuriating.

Columbia University suspended its CSSA branch in 2015 due to financial and student policy violations, only to reinstate the group’s club status not long after.

And at Harvard University, the Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct placed three anti-CCP undergraduate protestors on disciplinary probation and sent the CSSA-affiliated student who forcibly removed one of the protestors from the event an apology letter.

Caving to CSSAs’ demands to cancel events that the CCP considers sensitive counts as compliance. It serves only to legitimize these groups.

Given American academia’s lack of interest in addressing this issue, it’s time for the Trump administration to take action. The next best thing to banning these associations would be for the U.S. Department of State to label them as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act, coupled with aggressive enforcement. Such a designation is deserved considering CSSAs’ sources of funding and the manner in which they operate.

A foreign mission label would require chapters to receive official government approval for public events and to disclose information about financial transactions and personnel. In other words, CSSAs would be put under the federal microscope.

For too long, foreign adversaries have exploited the openness of American higher education. CSSAs are merely one part of the CCP problem on campuses across the country, but they’re an important one. At a time when China is escalating its attacks on our republic and the rest of the free world, the risks of not acting to restrict these associations far outweigh the benefits.

Washington must rise to the occasion as colleges and universities choose to look the other way.

Firearms have been around for over 400 years, yet it is only in the last 20 years that people have begun shouting “gun control”. Why then, only recently, has this become such an issue?
Moreover, why are there more mass-murderers than at any other time in our known history?
It is not because weapons are more powerful — 200-year-old muzzleloaders have a much greater force-per-round than today’s “assault rifles”. It is not because weapons are semi- or fully-automatic — rapid-fire weapons have been available for most of the last century. It is not due to a lack of laws — we have more “gun control” laws than ever.
It IS, however, because we have chosen to focus on “gun control” instead of crime control or “thug control.” It IS because only recently has the public become complacent enough to accept, by inaction, the violence present in our society.
– Kevin Langston

We Won’t Let Anti-Gun Billionaires Who Finance Civilian Disarmament Live in the Shadows Anymore.

For far too long, anti-gun groups have been nothing more than snake oil salesmen. They claim to speak for a vast army of grassroots citizens, but the reality is these groups are astroturf. They aren’t rooted in anything more than anti-gun animus. They’re also not nearly as down-to-earth with the people they claim to represent.

They’re a high-price, but cheap knockoff of the real thing. It’s fugazi grassroots.

NSSF has called them out in the past for their bought-and-paid-for activism and it’s time to do it again. Pull back the curtain and it’s easy to see that the antigun movement isn’t much more than a few billionaires and activist foundations pouring cash into their pet gun control projects…to the tune of over $400 million every year.

gun control orgs organizations

It’s also a willing media that goes right along with them, parroting half-truths and twisting narratives to demonize American gun owners and the firearm industry that serves them.

No more. Welcome Gun Rights Insights.

Gun Rights Insights is a new outreach initiative, including periodic videos, to pull back the veil that these anti-gun billionaires creep around telling America to give up their Second Amendment rights while they enjoy paid armed security. The “rules-for-thee, not-for-me” era must come to an end. That’s why NSSF’s Gun Rights Insights will be taking note of the gun control hypocrisy.

Anti-Gun Billionaire Michael Bloomberg

Take for instance, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City Mayor has made it his life’s goal to eliminate Second Amendment rights across the nation, spending over $50 million to attack lawful firearm ownership. While mayor, he organized Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That group was discredited when they “honored” the terrorist and Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a “gun violence victim” in 2013. Add to that, several MAIG members have, ironically, been charged with firearms-related offenses.

Bloomberg, of course, is the financier of Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and funds their anti-gun media mouthpiece The Trace.

Michael Bloomberg Angry
Michael Bloomberg (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

The Trace was seeded with funding tied to the gun control movement. The Trace claims to be “editorially independent,” but when a newsroom is funded by and built around a single political issue with the backing of major gun control activists, it’s fair — necessary, even — to scrutinize how it frames the facts.

After all, The Trace is headed by John Feinblatt, who also heads Everytown for Gun Safety and once served as a senior advisor to Bloomberg when he was mayor. Feinblatt is the principal officer listed on tax filings for The Trace. Everytown, of course, is a gun control organization that wants to see lawful firearm ownership eliminated in America.

john feinblatt president of everytown for gun safety
John Feinblatt (Image: NBC News)

To top it all off, The Trace admits that it has “more than a thousand readers who have stepped up to support financially.” The Trace reported they received over $6.3 million in 2024, according to the watchdog group InfluenceWatch. That means to make its budget work, each of those readers would have had to donated over $6,300.

That’s not likely. The Trace’s own website states they make public all donors who give over $1,000 or more per year. The Trace lists over 60 donors and donating foundations that reads like a veritable “who’s who” of gun control supporters.

The Soros Family and Foreign Money

George Soros, and now his son Alex, are another source of deep pockets for anti-gun efforts. George Soros’s entities spent $9 million for lobbying efforts to attack Second Amendment rights, including fighting to allow frivolous lawsuits to clog the courts and attempt to bankrupt the firearm industry through their “legislation-through-litigation” strategy.

By World Economic Forum – Flickr: George Soros CC BY-SA 2.0, 

Soros even worked with the Gun Action on Gun Violence, which assisted in the ill-fated and frivilous $10 billion lawsuit by Mexico against U.S. firearm manufacturers.

Alexander Soros
Alexander Soros (Image: Open Society Foundations)

That doesn’t even take into account the Hollywood celebrities who regularly harangue gun owners and the firearm industry. They do this while making movies and television shows featuring firearms, many times being used in irresponsible and illegal ways. And they do it while enjoying the safety of armed bodyguards.

The time is past due to expose this astroturf effort for what it is. It’s a paper-thin campaign to ostracize lawful firearm ownership, funded by wealthy elites who can afford their own armed security, but want to deny Second Amendment rights to law-abiding Americans. Poking holes into that false narrative is what Gun Rights Insights aims to do. Stay tuned.