The Supreme Court's Next Big Gun Fight Is About AR-15s
Guns dominated the Supreme Court's docket this year. Come fall, they're right back at center stage — this time with AR-15s in the crosshairs.
The core question the justices will be wrestling with traces back to a landmark 2022 ruling, which set a new bar for judging gun laws: any modern restriction has to line up with America's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Two years later, it looked like the Court might be softening that standard. But a pair of Second Amendment rulings this past June suggests otherwise — and that has real implications for the coming AR-15 showdown.
This year alone, the justices struck down Hawaii's restrictions on where guns could be carried in public. They also unanimously ruled that a federal law barring regular drug users from owning guns went too far, arguing neither law could be tied convincingly to firearm regulations from the 1700s and 1800s.
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who's written extensively on gun rights, noted that the Court initially seemed willing to accept looser historical comparisons — but that's shifted. The 2022 ruling demanded that any gun law be "consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation," and June's decisions applied that standard with real teeth.
A Test That Keeps Surprising People
Aidan Johnston, who lobbies for Gun Owners of America, sees the unanimous marijuana-and-guns ruling as a sign that things are trending in gun-rights advocates' favor — especially compared to a 2024 case that upheld a ban on gun ownership for domestic abusers, which briefly had activists worried the historical test was losing its bite.
Even the Court's liberal wing signed onto that unanimous ruling, though Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been openly critical of the whole framework, arguing it's simply unworkable and should be tossed out.
Gun violence prevention advocates aren't fans of the test either, but they see room within it to defend modern restrictions. Douglas Letter, chief legal officer at the gun violence prevention group Brady, argues nothing in the recent rulings undercuts the long-standing principle that dangerous or unusual weapons can be restricted — the real fight, he says, is over where exactly that line gets drawn.
Judges Comparing AR-15s To Bowie Knives
Applying a centuries-old historical framework to a modern semiautomatic rifle is proving messy in practice. When Illinois' ban on certain semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines was upheld this July, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals leaned on 19th-century Bowie knife restrictions as a historical parallel — reasoning that both weapons caused unusually severe harm and were regulated accordingly.
Just days later, a different appeals court rejected that comparison entirely. The 3rd Circuit struck down New Jersey's assault weapons ban, ruling 10-5 that Bowie knives never had the kind of widespread lawful use that AR-15s do today — noting there are an estimated 24 million AR-15-style rifles currently owned in the U.S., overwhelmingly for legal purposes.
Legal scholars have raised questions about how workable this whole approach really is. University of Chicago law professor Darrell Miller pointed out that some of the historical comparisons judges are forced to make — like whether a modern jet is legally more like a horse, a carriage, or a boat — leave even close observers baffled.
Duke law professor Joseph Blocher raised a similar concern, noting that recent opinions have gotten deep into oddly specific historical details — like Justice Neil Gorsuch's writeup on how much the founding fathers drank — that feel disconnected from what most people expect constitutional interpretation to actually involve.
Why AR-15s Are Different
Unlike the marijuana-and-guns case, where the Court managed a narrow ruling that left room for both sides, Blocher doesn't see an easy middle ground here. AR-15s carry outsized symbolic weight in the national gun debate — closely associated with mass shootings in the public imagination, yet also enormously popular among law-abiding owners, sometimes nicknamed the "iPhone of guns" for how customizable and widely owned they are.
That combination, Blocher says, means the case isn't just about legal doctrine — it's tangled up in identity and politics on every side of the debate, which is exactly what makes the stakes so high heading into this fall's arguments.
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