Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented in the courts refusal to hear a case out of Chicago challenging assault weapons bans last year and I found their dissent interesting -
Thomas wrote, “Roughly five million Americans own AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles.” And he explained that 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.”
When Thomas says that SCOTUS’s precedents demonstrate that the commonality of the AR-15 is evidence of its protections under the Second Amendment, he is alluding to the court’s decision in District of Columbia v Heller (2008). There the court explained that the test of commonality is one of the chief means of ascertaining which weapons are protected for the people’s possession.
According to Heller, “the sorts of weapons protected” by the Second Amendment when it was written were those “in common use at the time.” And this has been true throughout the 224 years that have passed since the Second Amendment’s ratification. It means the guns “in common use” among the citizenry are the guns protected by the Bill of Rights. And with five million AR-15 owners in America today, those rifles are certainly “in common use” among the citizenry, and therefore protected. Click Here Who where wouldn't agree that the AR-15 and high capacity magazines aren't as common as flees on a dogs back? The AR-15 has become America's rifle, banning it violates the constitution.
