In a stunning setback for Second Amendment advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a major case challenging Maryland’s unconstitutional ban on AR-15 ownership — a move that effectively leaves the radical anti-gun law intact and emboldens blue states to continue chipping away at fundamental American freedoms.

The case, Snope v. Brown, was denied certiorari, meaning the decision of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stands. That court upheld Maryland’s sweeping ban on so-called “assault weapons,” including the popular AR-15 — the most commonly owned rifle in America.

While conservative stalwarts Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch were prepared to hear the case, Chief Justice John Roberts once again aligned with the liberal wing of the Court. More disappointingly, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh also joined in denying review — an action that has gun rights supporters and constitutionalists sounding the alarm.

The ruling lets stand a decision written by Reagan appointee Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who claimed that AR-15s are “primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States,” and therefore not protected under the Constitution — a blatant distortion of the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision.

Justice Kavanaugh issued a written statement attempting to explain his decision, insisting that the Court may revisit the issue “in the next Term or two,” and that denying certiorari now doesn’t mean the justices agree with the lower court.

But Justice Thomas wasn’t buying it.

“I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America,” Thomas wrote in a powerful dissent. “We have avoided deciding it for a full decade.”

Thomas warned that this continued silence from the High Court leaves the door wide open for the federal government to unilaterally reclassify AR-15s as machine guns, effectively banning them nationwide — an outcome the Left has long been openly pushing.

AR-15s are not machine guns. They fire only one round per trigger pull — a feature shared by countless semi-automatic firearms that have existed for over a century. But that hasn’t stopped gun control advocates and legacy media from demonizing the rifle or twisting its popularity into a liability.

Justice Kavanaugh himself acknowledged that AR-15s are in “common use” by law-abiding citizens — a key legal test set forth in the Heller decision. An estimated 20 to 30 million AR-15s are legally owned across the U.S., and 41 states still permit their purchase and possession.

Yet states like Maryland, California, New York, and New Jersey continue enforcing bans that disarm law-abiding citizens while criminals remain undeterred.

Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation, which spearheaded the case, blasted the Court’s refusal to step in:

“It is an egregious error that the Court continues to sidestep addressing an important issue that requires its intervention,” he wrote on X.
“Millions of Americans continue to be disenfranchised from exercising their complete Second Amendment rights by virtue of these categorical bans.”

This latest act of judicial cowardice leaves Americans wondering: If the Supreme Court won’t defend the Constitution, who will?