On April 4, 2013, Connecticut passed a law banning various types of semiautomatic firearms, labeling them with the misleading term “assault weapons.” (There is no type of firearm called an “assault weapon,” and it is different from an assault rifle.) It banned common firearms if they contained certain cosmetic features that have no relationship to the lethal force of the weapon, such as whether the gun has a folding stock for the shoulder, or a pistol grip for the owner’s hand.
A group of gun owners sued in Shew v. Malloy, represented by two of the top Second Amendment lawyers in the country: David Thompson (managing partner of the famous Charles Cooper’s law firm, Cooper & Kirk), and Dr. Stephen Halbrook, who won the landmark 1997 Tenth Amendment Supreme Court case striking down part of Bill Clinton’s Brady Law, Printz v. U.S.
In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the trial court in this case, holding that Connecticut’s “assault weapons” ban did not violate the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Thompson and Halbrook then filed a petition for a writ of certiorari (a “cert petition”) with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to review the case.
Thompson and Halbrook did an excellent job of explaining how a three-way “circuit split” has developed among the federal courts of appeals with jurisdiction over different parts of the country regarding what type of judicial scrutiny courts apply when examining gun control laws. The split is over whether courts apply what the law calls “strict scrutiny,” “intermediate scrutiny,” or consult history to determine whether a challenged gun restriction violates the Second Amendment.
