Oral arguments hit the Supreme Court on December 2 in a pair of cases that could settle whether states and counties can keep banning the most popular rifle platform in the country. SCOTUSblog lists Viramontes v. Cook County as consolidated with Grant v. Higgins out of Connecticut. The question is straightforward: do the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles?
Cook County’s ordinance has blocked possession, sale, and transfer of what it calls assault weapons for years. That includes AR-15s, AK-style rifles, and a long list of others that take detachable magazines and have certain features. Connecticut’s post-Sandy Hook law does similar work. The Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, and individual plaintiffs have been fighting the Cook County version since 2021. Lower courts sided with the governments. Now the high court is taking a look.
Challengers say these rifles are in common use for lawful purposes—self-defense, target shooting, hunting. Estimates put ownership somewhere between 20 and 30 million in civilian hands. Defenders push the opposite line: these are weapons better suited to war than civilian life, so they fall outside Second Amendment protection.
A recent opinion piece in The Hill by Matthew Cavedon of the Cato Institute argues that both sides are missing something. The militia language in the Second Amendment actually cuts in favor of protecting the AR-15 either way. The amendment’s text is clear: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Cavedon points out that historically the militia meant all able-bodied men who kept small arms suited to infantry service and showed up with them when called. Not artillery. Not crew-served weapons. Portable rifles. The AR-15 is a readily portable semiautomatic rifle—exactly the category of arm a militia member historically kept. The full-auto M-16 is a different animal; the civilian AR-15 is not. Far from being a strike against constitutional protection, that military utility weighs in its favor.
This tracks with what the Cato Institute argued in its own amicus brief. Self-defense is part of the right, but the amendment’s stated purpose also covers the security of a free state through an armed populace. Building a bright line between “self-defense guns” that get protection and “weapons of war” that don’t is ahistorical. The Court already noted in Heller that the Second Amendment does not protect dangerous and unusual weapons, but the AR-15 does not fit that description when millions of law-abiding people own them.
The United States has filed an amicus brief supporting the petitioners, arguing the rifles are constitutionally protected arms in common use and that the bans are unconstitutional. Plenty of other groups have weighed in on the challengers’ side as well. Respondents filed their merits briefs in late October.
A decision is expected sometime in the first half of 2027. If the Court rules that these rifles are protected, similar bans in other states could face the same fate. If it goes the other way, the “common use” principle gets a narrower reading and more restrictions become easier to defend. Either outcome will matter for anyone who owns, sells, or plans to buy an AR-15 platform rifle.
The case is Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238 (consolidated with No. 25-566). Argument is set for December 2. You can follow the docket on SCOTUSblog or the Firearms Policy Coalition’s case page.
This is one of the bigger Second Amendment cases since Bruen. Worth watching.