Sandy Hook Families Urge Supreme Court to Uphold Rifle Bans

Parents of five of the 20 first-graders killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and a relative of one of the six educators who died, filed a friend-of-the-court brief at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday urging the justices to leave state bans on AR-15-style rifles in place, The Associated Press reported. Sandy Hook Promise filed a similar brief, and more than 40 other people and groups also filed briefs, most of them supporting the bans.

The court will hear challenges to Connecticut’s ban, enacted in 2013 after the shooting, and to a Cook County, Illinois, ban first passed in 1993. Lower courts upheld both. Arguments are set for early December (AP gives Dec. 2, the Washington Post Dec. 3), and the Post reported that a decision is expected by June or July. The Post said Sandy Hook Promise argues that the bans fit Supreme Court precedent allowing regulation of unusually dangerous weapons and notes that Connecticut has had no mass shooting since Sandy Hook.

Gun-rights groups, including the Second Amendment Foundation, argue that banning semiautomatic rifles violates the Second Amendment and say school security, not gun bans, is the real answer. The Post reported that the Trump administration backs the challengers. Similar bans exist in about a dozen states.