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Supreme Court declines to review Conn. ban on assault weapons

Two lower courts had previously thrown out the challenge.

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ORLANDO -A loss for the NRA – the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges to assault weapons bans in both CT and NY, in the aftermath of the Orlando attack, You know what that means, don’t you?

The court lost one of its strongest pro-gun rights members in February when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died.

Maryland’s 2013 law also requires fingerprint licensing for gun buyers, making it one of the toughest laws in the country.

Like other laws, Connecticut’s ban includes semiautomatic guns and high-capacity magazines, covers popular weapons such as AR-15s and AK-47s, and names more than 180 weapons that can not be sold.

Some of the families of the victims of the Newtown mass shooting are not calling for a ban of the type of weapon Adam Lanza used to murder their …

As the debate over gun control laws continues to roil the nation and Congress, the Supreme Court on Monday again chose to stay on the sidelines. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, presumably would nominate liberals not inclined to support the gun-rights position. The ban was quickly challenged by those who claimed that the gun restrictions were unconstitutional.

From that decision: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited”.

“The firearms that Connecticut has inaccurately and pejoratively labeled “assault weapons” in reality are semi-automatic firearms with safety- and accuracy-enhancing features that millions of Americans possess for lawful purposes, ” said a court brief submitted on behalf of the Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League. At the Supreme Court, that measure was challenged by state resident Douglas E. Kampfer, who filed his Supreme Court appeal without the help of a lawyer.

“At least since the enactment of the federal assault‐weapons ban, semiautomatic assault weapons have been understood to pose unusual risks”, the Court wrote.

Connecticut’s law was passed after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, when 20 students and six educators were killed, and expanded the list of assault weapons that had already been prohibited in the state.

The Supreme Court issued important rulings in gun cases in 2008 and 2010 but has not taken up a major firearms case since.

So the governments in the United States should feel free to regulate and then defend those regulations in court.

Blumenthal said the decision “supports my conviction that CT is right on the law: the right to bear arms does not rescind or remove our obligation to keep our citizens safe”.

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Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement following the ruling, “During tragic times, we acted”.

US Supreme Court rejects challenge to state assault weapon bans