By Tanya Metaksa
What’s New — SCOTUS: Viramontes v. Cook County, Docket # 25-236; and Grant v. Higgins, Docket # 25-566: Oral Argument set for Dec. 2; Brief Of Amicus Curiae Professor Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor Of Law And Political Science, Yale University And Yale University School Of Law, In Support Of Neither Party; Amicus Brief of the U.S. Government; Court of Appeals: Elite Precision Customs, L.L.C., et al. v. ATF, et al., No. 25-11206, an appeal from the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:25-cv-00044-P. Oral argument occurred on Sept. 2; District Court Maryland: Third District: United States of America v. Montgomery County, Maryland, et al., Case No. 8:26-cv-03025. United States District Court for the District of Maryland: The suit was filed on Aug. 3, to invalidate the County’s revised “sensitive places” firearm restrictions; Virgin Islands: United States District Court District of the Virgin Islands D.V.I., United States v. Government of the Virgin Islands: Case No. 3:25-cv-00050, (D.V.I.): filed on Dec. 16, 2025: The United States filed motions for a preliminary injunction in June and July 2026 and moved for summary judgment on Aug. 10.
Week ending September 5, 2026
The week’s dominant development was procedural but consequential: the Supreme Court set its consolidated AR-15/semiautomatic-rifle cases for Dec. 2, while the merits docket saw a substantial influx of amici. The docket lists filings from the United States; 27 states; major firearms organizations; gun-rights organizations; academics; firearms-industry interests; law-enforcement groups; and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. At the same time, the Administration’s decision not to obtain an immediate stay of the Northern District of Texas’s NFA ruling left a major practical and constitutional dispute over suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs in an unusually unsettled posture.
SCOTUS
Viramontes v. Cook County, Docket # 25-236; and Grant v. Higgins, Docket # 25-566
INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE
Akhil Reed Amar
Akhil Reed Amar is a constitutional scholar and historian who seeks to aid this Court in its efforts to practice principled constitutional decision-making and faithful originalism. In previous briefs to this Court, he has advanced, and today he once again advances, positions that he has taken as an academic long before any partisan or narrowly political implications could have been known.
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
This case presents this Court a perfect opportunity to improve the basic framework for how judges and justices going forward should decide gun and gun-adjacent cases.
An improved framework going forward would distinguish between citizens seeking to possess and use guns for legitimate self-protection and those seeking to possess and use guns for other lawful purposes, such as sport.
First: Presumptively law-abiding and nonthreatening adult citizens—Black and White, male and female—seeking weapons for legitimate self-protection deserve strong judicial solicitude because their rights-claim lies close to a core historical purpose that animated the architects of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s.
This self-protection rights-claim does not, however, lie especially close to the core historical purposes that animated the architects of the Second Amendment in the 1780s and 1790s. True, this Court in Heller tried to root the self-protection right solely in the Second Amendment, while all but ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment. This was a mistake. More recent rulings by this Court have properly stressed the Fourteenth Amendment. Even so, these rulings have not gone far enough in centering analysis on this key Reconstruction Amendment.
Second: Weapons for sport are constitutionally different than weapons for self-defense. Sports weapons deserve strong judicial protection only when laws restricting such weapons are outlier laws in modern America—laws that flunk the unenumerated rights state-counting test of Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997), a test notably anticipated by Justice Harlan’s separate opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) and Justice Washington’s Circuit Court opinion in Corfield v. Coryell, 6 F. Cas. 546 (1823)
Under the improved doctrinal framework proposed and elaborated infra, the decision below should be reversed.
First: AR-15 platform weapons are facially proper weapons for lawful self-defense by presumptively law-abiding and nonthreatening adults, and as such fall within the core gun right, the paradigm case, as envisioned by the architects of the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s.
Second: Roughly four-fifths of America’s states, encompassing roughly two-thirds of America’s current population, impose no serious impediments on AR-15s. Even if AR-15s in these states are used mainly for sporting purposes, the combined weight of these states provides a distinct basis, beyond self-defense, for deeming AR-15 possession and use a fundamental right in modern America, under Glucksberg’s state-counting and outlier-focused approach to unenumerated rights.
Finally, amicus urges this Court to reserve decision on whether laws that restrict large-capacity magazines (LCMs) as such, as distinct from AR-15 platform weapons that are merely capable of accepting magazines of various sizes, likewise violate 4 the Constitution. LCMs are not ordinarily needed for self-defense by presumptively law-abiding adults. Thus, any strong judicial protection for LCMs would need to rest entirely on a Glucksberg-Griswold analysis. Such analysis should carefully credit the substantial number of states—thirteen at last count, including many high-population states, and all of them “blue” states—that currently seek to limit LCMs to protect the public from mass shootings. A proper Glucksberg-Griswold approach should also factor in the possibly significant number of additional states, many also likely to be “blue,” that might seek to join this magazine-restricting club in the near future, if left free to do so by this Court. Griswold approach should also factor in the possibly significant number of additional states, many also likely to be “blue,” that might seek to join this magazine-restricting club in.
Amicus Brief of the US Government
Those bans are unconstitutional.
A firearms restriction comports with the Second Amendment only if it is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 24 (2022). And this country’s regulatory tradition precludes banning arms that are “in common use” among law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 624 (2008). That common use test has deep historical roots in English and American law. This Court has already adopted that test and has repeatedly applied it to evaluate the validity of arms bans. See Bruen, 597 U.S. at 47; Heller, 554 U.S. at 627; United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939). The AR-15 rifle is unquestionably in common use among law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. Today, AR-15s are lawful at the federal level and in 40 States. The overwhelming majority of AR-15 owners possess those rifles for the lawful purposes to which they are adapted, such as self-defense in the home, hunting, and target shooting. A ban on possessing such rifles thus violates the Second Amendment.
Court of Appeals
Elite Precision Customs, L.L.C., et al. v. ATF, et al., No. 25-11206, an appeal from the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:25-cv-00044-P. Oral argument occurred on Sept. 2.
What it challenged
The plaintiffs—Elite Precision Customs, two prospective handgun purchasers (Tim Herron and Freddie Blish), and the Firearms Policy Coalition—challenged the federal interstate-handgun-transfer rules, principally 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(3). Those provisions bar a federally licensed dealer from directly transferring a handgun to an out-of-state resident; instead, the handgun must be sent to a federally licensed dealer in the buyer’s home state for the eventual transfer,
Constitutional issue
The plaintiffs argued that this residency-based transfer restriction infringes the Second Amendment under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen: it prevents an otherwise lawful adult from taking possession of a handgun bought while outside his or her home state, and the government allegedly cannot identify a sufficiently analogous historical firearms regulation. The argument panel consisted of Judges Jerry E. Smith, Catharina Haynes, and Kurt D. Engelhardt.
District Court decision
District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee, dismissed the challenge in 2025, reasoning that the restriction was a presumptively lawful commercial-sale regulation and did not implicate the Second Amendment’s plain text in the relevant way. The appeal asks the Fifth Circuit to reverse that dismissal, in light of Bruen and notwithstanding the circuit’s pre-Bruen decision in Mance v. Sessions, which had upheld the same statutory scheme.
District Court
Maryland: Third District
United States of America v. Montgomery County, Maryland, et al., Case No. 8:26-cv-03025. United States District Court for the District of Maryland
The defendants include Montgomery County, the Montgomery County Police Department, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, and Sheriff Maxwell C. Uy. DOJ’s preliminary-injunction memorandum is available through CourtListener’s RECAP archive:
The suit was filed on Aug. 3 against Montgomery County and County public-safety officials. The Department of Justice has sued seeking to invalidate the County’s revised “sensitive places” firearm restrictions—particularly the ban on carrying at or within 100 yards of places of worship and other public-assembly locations. DOJ’s central position is that the law makes ordinary licensed public carry practically impossible and conflicts with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment framework.
For the places of worship provision, the practical effect is not merely a restriction inside a sanctuary. The exclusion zone reaches the worship site and its associated grounds, as well as nearby areas within 100 yards. DOJ maintains that the restriction applies even to a person with a Maryland carry permit and—even more notably—even where the religious institution’s owner or leadership expressly consents to the firearm.
The County has moved to dismiss with prejudice and opposes preliminary injunctive relief. Its principal arguments are that DOJ lacks a proper statutory basis to bring this action absent a pattern or practice of actual unconstitutional enforcement, and that the County’s rules are historically justified.
DOJ’s theory
DOJ characterizes the scheme as “breathtaking in scope”: thousands of restricted locations plus a 100-yard buffer around each allegedly create overlapping no-carry zones across large parts of the County. The constitutional harm, according to DOJ, is that a law-abiding permit holder cannot realistically carry for self-defense while moving through ordinary daily activities.
The federal government relies chiefly on New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen and the Supreme Court’s subsequent decision in Wolford v. Lopez. DOJ reads Wolford to reject a broad prohibition that prevents armed citizens from carrying in places routinely encountered in daily life; it argues Montgomery County’s site-specific prohibitions and buffers produce that very result.
For places of worship specifically, DOJ’s position is that there is no sufficiently established national historical tradition of government-imposed firearm bans in churches or comparable religious institutions to sustain the County’s blanket rule. The suit therefore places the historical record on firearms in religious settings—rather than generalized public-safety evidence—at the center of the merits dispute.
Significance
This is an important federal test of the post-Bruen/Wolford doctrine for local sensitive-place laws. It squarely presents whether a locality can combine numerous designated gun-free locations with wide geographic buffers, and whether it may override a church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious institution’s choice to allow licensed carry on its premises.
The case also has a First Amendment-adjacent dimension: although DOJ’s presently reported challenge is framed as a Second Amendment action, the worship-site provision raises a separate question whether government may displace a religious institution’s control over security arrangements and the conditions of entry onto its property. The present case, however, will initially turn most directly on DOJ’s authority to sue, the scope of Wolford, and the parties’ competing historical evidence about weapons restrictions in houses of worship.
Virgin Islands: United States District Court District of the Virgin Islands D.V.I.
United States v. Government of the Virgin Islands: Case No. 3:25-cv-00050, (D.V.I.): filed on Dec. 16, 2025: U.S. District Judge Evan Rikhye. A pending federal civil-rights action in the District Court of the Virgin Islands characterized as a federal-question civil-rights case brought by the United States.
Summary
The United States sued the Government of the Virgin Islands, the Virgin Islands Police Department, and Police Commissioner Mario Brooks, challenging the Territory’s firearm-licensing system. The federal government alleges that the defendants’ application procedures, delays, and conditions on licensing impermissibly burden law-abiding residents’ ability to acquire and possess firearms, in violation principally of the Second Amendment; the case summary also frames the challenge as involving Fourth Amendment concerns.
The litigation seeks prospective relief against the allegedly unconstitutional licensing practices rather than damages. The defendants answered the complaint and later opposed the United States’ requested preliminary injunction, while also moving to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction under Rule 12(b)(1).
Procedural posture
The parties have engaged in discovery and mediation. The United States filed motions for a preliminary injunction in June and July 2026 and moved for summary judgment on Aug. 10; defendants filed opposition papers and a motion concerning withdrawal of admissions.
As of the latest publicly indexed docket update, the case remains ongoing. The court denied defendants’ motion to strike the later preliminary-injunction motion and Judge Evan Rikhye denied the defendants’ motion to strike the United States’ July 22, 2026 motion for a preliminary injunction. The court therefore permitted the United States to proceed with that motion instead of removing it from the docket.
Context
The United States had filed an earlier preliminary-injunction motion on June 10. After the Virgin Islands enacted or relied on statutory and administrative changes to its firearms-licensing framework—including Act No. 9113—the United States filed a second preliminary-injunction motion on July 22, apparently to address the revised legal and factual circumstances.
The August 18 memorandum opinion rejected that procedural challenge, leaving the preliminary-injunction dispute for further briefing and argument rather than deciding whether the Virgin Islands’ firearm-licensing system is constitutional. The August 18 opinion appears to be the ruling connected to the motion to strike, not a final merits ruling in this case.. The docket also reflects a bench trial setting for November 1, 2027.
