By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a challenge to the legality of state restrictions on assault-style rifles, giving the justices another chance to expand gun rights in a case that involves a type of weapon often associated with mass shootings.
The justices took up two appeals after lower courts upheld a bans in Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut on powerful semi-automatic rifles such as AR-15s. The lower courts rejected arguments that
the measures violate the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms."
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October.
In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence including numerous mass shootings, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, often has taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment.
Challengers to the restrictions have said assault-style rifles and large-capacity magazines are popular firearms and that limits on them flout Supreme Court precedents that make clear that the Second Amendment protects weapons that are in "common use."
The Supreme Court broadened gun rights in landmark rulings in 2008 and 2010 as well as in a 2022 case that made it harder to defend gun restrictions under the Second Amendment, requiring such measures to be "consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."
The court expanded Second Amendment rights in two rulings during its current term.
On June 26, the court struck down a Hawaii law restricting the carrying of handguns on private property open to the public, like most businesses, without the owner's permission. On June 18, it limited the application of a decades-old federal law that bars firearms possession by certain drug users, narrowing a measure that had threatened the gun rights of millions of Americans who use marijuana and own firearms.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
