The Supreme Court handed down a very brief order on Wednesday morning that offers gun regulation advocates a slightly surprising — but likely short-lived — victory.
The order denies relief to litigants challenging Illinois’s ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, and a similar ban enacted by the city of Naperville, Illinois, who had argued both violated the Second Amendment. Had these litigants prevailed in the nation’s highest court, such a decision could have invalidated assault rifle bans throughout the United States.
That said, Wednesday’s order is only a very brief victory for proponents of gun regulation. The case, known as National Association for Gun Rights v. City of Naperville, arose on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a hodgepodge of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the Court sometimes decides without full briefing or oral argument. The most likely explanation for the Court’s latest order is that a majority of the justices believed that this case did not warrant this expedited treatment, not that a majority of the Court will ultimately vote to uphold assault rifle bans. (Notably, Brett Kavanaugh, the median justice on the current, very conservative Supreme Court, is a longtime proponent of legalizing assault weapons.)
The case will be heard by a federal appeals court in late June, and that court’s decision may be reviewed by the Supreme Court under its ordinary, less rushed process for hearing cases.
Nevertheless, the Court’s brief order in the Naperville case is significant less because of what it says about the justices’ approach to gun policy than because it suggests that at least some key members of the Supreme Court have grown disillusioned with the Court’s once-very-frequent use of the shadow docket.
The Court started issuing many shadow docket orders that benefited conservatives during the Trump administration
Historically, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to weigh in on any case before it was…
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