Federal appeals panel upholds Connecticut’s assault weapons ban

NEW YORK (AP) — A ban on assault weapons that Connecticut put in place after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is constitutional, a federal appeals court said Friday, as it rejected challenges by gun rights advocates who claim it violates the Second Amendment.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said groups challenging a 2013 law banning assault weapons and a second gun control law enacted a decade later could not show that the guns they are still able to possess, including several semi-automatic handguns, are not sufficient for self-defense purposes.

The 2nd Circuit also said public interest favors allowing the ban.

The appeals court said the Second Amendment lets legislators implement targeted regulations designed to protect residents and their children from experiencing tragedies like the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed 26 lives.

The ruling came at an early stage for two lawsuits brought by individuals and gun rights groups. It upheld a Connecticut judge’s ruling that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a sufficient likelihood that they would win their challenge to block enforcement of the laws while the lawsuits proceed.

Several lawyers who represented plaintiffs in the litigation said in a statement that the ruling “ignores the U.S. Supreme Court’s clear and specific directives, and elevates ideology over constitutional rights. The Supreme Court must put a stop to our courts treating the Second Amendment as if it were not part the Bill of Rights.”

Hannah Hill, vice president for the National Association for Gun Rights’ legal wing, a plaintiff in the lawsuits, said the 2nd Circuit judges displayed an “utter disregard for multiple Supreme Court precedents.”

She said the decision “almost reads like a bingo card for how many ways they can trample on all of those precedents.”

“This is not the end. We’re going to keep fighting,” she said, adding that the Connecticut litigation is one of several efforts in multiple states that gun advocates hope to eventually get the Supreme Court to address.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a release that he has “no illusion that today’s clear decision will stop the gun lobby’s relentless campaign to flood our communities with ever more deadly weapons.

“We will not back down, and we are going to fight with everything we’ve got to keep these weapons of war off our streets, out of our schools, and away from our families,” he said.

Joshua Perry, an attorney who is now in private practice but worked on the case when he was Connecticut’s solicitor general, said the ruling was “a comprehensive, important win for the people of Connecticut.”

He added: “We showed that the Constitution doesn’t leave us defenseless against the menace of gun violence.”

In a decision written by Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr., the appeals court said the proliferation of unusually dangerous weapons has “led to a frequent, growing, and extremely lethal threat to public safety, actual and widely perceived” that the authors of the Constitution could not have imagined.

“And such incidents remain distressingly frequent,” it said. “The Founders faced no problem comparable to a single gunman carrying out a mass murder in seconds.”

The 2nd Circuit, based in Manhattan, said it joined all five other federal appeals courts that have addressed the issue by upholding the ban.

In doing so, it said it recognized “a historical tradition of regulating unusually dangerous weapons after their use in terror or to perpetuate mass casualties.”

It noted that the development of the Thompson submachine gun in 1918 and its subsequent use by gangsters in mass shootings, led to the National Firearms Act of 1934. That law prohibited ownership of machine guns, submachine guns, and short-barreled shotguns.

“Historical legislators regulated these unusually dangerous arms, like here, after observing the regulated weapons’ unprecedented lethality. They did so, like here, to prevent the use of these especially dangerous variants of otherwise lawful types of weapons in further acts of mass homicide and terror,” the judges wrote.

Lawyers who argued the case before the appeals court did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.