On April 30, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) introduced the so-called “Assault Weapons Ban of 2025.” Picking up where his predecessor Dianne Feinstein left off, Schiff’s legislation would ban commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms, such as the AR-15.
A week earlier, Illinois state Sen. Celina Villanueva (D) filed SB2652, the so-called “Responsible Gun Manufacturing Act.” A companion House bill, HB4045 was filed a few days later. These bills would ban the ubiquitous Glock semi-automatic handguns.
Semi-automatic gun bans are bad policy, as demonstrated for all during the 1994-2004 Clinton “assault weapons” ban. However, these recent gun ban efforts are notable because they are directly athwart U.S. Supreme Court precedent on the Second Amendment.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), opinion author Justice Antonin Scalia made clear that the types of firearms protected by the Second Amendment include those “in common use at the time” for “lawful purposes like self-defense.”
If after Heller there was any remaining doubt as to what Justice Scalia meant in his opinion, as it pertained to semi-automatic rifles, the justice settled it in 2015. That year, Justice Scalia joined Justice Clarence Thomas in a dissent from the denial of certiorari in Friedman v. Highland Park, a case concerning a local ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms.
In the dissent, Justice Thomas lamented that despite the Supreme Court’s holdings in Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, “several Courts of Appeals… have upheld categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes,” which he made clear was “noncompliance with our Second Amendment precedents.”
Justice Thomas went on to explain,
Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.
Further, in the 1994 case Staples v. United States, the Supreme Court determined that semi-automatic rifles were common. The case concerned the mens rea requirement for a conviction for possession of an unregistered machine gun. The subject of the case had argued that he was unaware that the AR-15 in his possession had been modified for automatic fire and was not simply a legal semi-automatic AR-15.
In the majority opinion, Justice Thomas made clear that the mere possession of a converted AR-15 is not enough to infer a mens rea sufficient for conviction, as some firearms are, “so commonplace and generally available that we would not consider them to alert individuals to the likelihood of strict regulation.” Justice Thomas went on to write that most categories of guns, including semi-automatic rifles, “traditionally have been widely accepted as lawful possessions.” Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed onto Thomas’s opinion.
So, the intent of Scalia’s Heller opinion is clear on the matter of semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15. However, it’s hard to overstate just how “in common use” AR-15s are. The AR-15 is arguably the rifle most “in common use.”
One of the few things that people who love and hate guns agree on is that the AR-15 is wildly popular with the gun-owning public, with even the Washington Post admitting that their polling suggests about one in 20 American adults (about 6 percent) own at least one AR-15. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (the trade association for the firearms industry) estimated that 30.7 million “modern sporting rifles,” such as the AR-15, have been produced just since 1990.
Legislation targeting Glock pistols is similarly absurd. Glock manufactures some of the most popular pistols in the world.
According to industry manufacturer reporting data, Glock produced 581,944 handguns just in the U.S. in 2021 and another 465,117 in 2022. Moreover, Glock’s home country of Austria accounted for over 1.4 million handgun imports in 2022 and over 1.2 million in 2023 (not necessarily all Glocks).
Glock has a reasonable claim to making the most reliable, field-tested semi-automatic pistols in the world. That is one of the reasons Glocks are the standard duty sidearm of numerous federal agencies, including the ATF and FBI. The company notes that their firearms “are now the weapon of choice for over 65 percent of the law enforcement agencies across the United States, and they’re used in more than 50 elite military units worldwide.” Glock pistols are on the Chicago Police Department’s list of department approved handguns.
When the anti-gun former Vice President Kamala Harris unsuccessfully attempted to connect with gun owners, she claimed she owned a Glock.
By going after the most popular firearms “in common use” for lawful purposes, gun control advocates are demonstrating an unbridled disdain for American gun owners, the Second Amendment, and judicial precedent.
They are also putting America on notice that if they’re willing to ban these guns, there is no logical limit to their gun ban ambitions
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