AT THE UPCOMING CONFERENCE, WILL THE U.S. SUPREME COURT FINALLY AGREE TO GRANT REVIEW OF THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT SECOND AMENDMENT CASES TO COME BEFORE IT SINCE BRUEN: SNOPE AND ANTONYUK?

On February 24, 2025, the website, “Bearing Arms,” in an article titled, “Sixth Time the Charm for Snope at SCOTUS?”, the author Cam Edwards, wistfully answers the question he poses in the title of his article, writing,  

We can only hope. The Supreme Court has once again scheduled both Snope v. Brown and Ocean State Tactical v. Neronha for debate in conference this week, keeping hope alive that the justices will grant cert to one or both cases next week. 

This Friday's [February 28, 2025] conference will be the sixth appearance for Snope (which is the challenge to Maryland's ban on so-called assault weapons), while Ocean State Tactical (taking on Rhode Island's ban on "large capacity" magazines) is up for its seventh go-round behind closed doors as the justice decide what cases they'll accept. The good news is that neither of these cases were disposed of in today's orders, but that still doesn't mean that either or both are guaranteed to be heard by SCOTUS in the future. . . .

I have to say that I'm still cautiously optimistic as well. Both Snope and Ocean State Tactical have been heard in conference since mid-December (December 4, in the case of Ocean State Tactical), which is more than enough time for Justice Thomas, Gorsuch, or Alito to write a dissent from denial of cert. 

Of course, that's also plenty of time for four justices to vote to hear one or both of these cases, and that doesn't appear to have happened yet either.

We, at the Arbalest Quarrel also fervently hope the High Court will garner at least four votes necessary to review the case. But our expectation is that it won’t. The issue presented for review, as succinctly stated in the Petitioners’ Brief in support of their Writ, is, we believe, too hot for Chief Justice Roberts to touch.

Whether the Constitution permits the State of Maryland to ban semiautomatic rifles that are in common use for lawful purposes, including the most popular rifle in America.

Yet, at some point the Court is going to have to take a stand on whether semiautomatic weapons fall within the core protection of the natural law right codified in the Second Amendment, or not. A positive ruling, consistent with the plain meaning of the Second Amendment and with the Court’s previous landmark rulings and reasoning, would make Snope the fourth landmark case.

As of the posting of this article on our site, the evening before the Court’s conference, we just don’t know what the Court will do.

We do fervently hope the Court will garner the four votes necessary to review the case.

But, our expectation is that it won’t, and would not be inclined to do so unless the Conservative wing of the Court is certain it has a clear majority were the case taken up, and that the majority will then proceed to posit a plain, emphatic, broad and bold ruling, not a tepid, watered-down narrow ruling.

THE CALCULUS OF HIGH COURT VOTES ON WHETHER TO GRANT OR DENY A PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI

If the Conservative wing Justices have any serious doubt about securing a consensus among the majority of the Court, they will vote to deny granting the Petitioners’ Writ of Certiorari. They won’t risk a negative ruling if the Court garners four votes necessary to grant review of the case.

Now, when we refer to the “Conservative wing” of the Court we mean the true “Conservative wing.”

This true “Conservative wing,” consists, in our estimate, of just two Associate Justices, namely, Clarence Thomas (author of the Bruen decision) and Samuel Alito (author of the McDonald decision), both of whom supported the Heller decision, penned by the late eminent Justice Antonin Scalia.

If four Justices vote to grant review of Snope, this means that at least five members of the Court—a narrow majority—do in fact exist, sufficient to provide a favorable ruling for the Petitioners in Snope.

We do fervently hope the Court will garner the four votes necessary to review the case. But, our expectation is that it won’t, and would not do so unless the Conservative wing of the Court is certain it has a clear majority were the case taken up. If they have any doubt about the matter, they won’t risk an adverse ruling.

Too much is at stake, i.e., whether semiautomatic weapons fall within the core protection of the natural law right codified in the Second Amendment, or not.

By reference to the Conservative wing of the Court, we are referring to the true Conservative wing. That true Conservative wing consists presently of just two Associate Justices, Clarence Thomas (author of the Bruen decision) and Samuel Alito (author of the McDonald decision), both of whom supported the Heller decision, penned by the late eminent Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will not vote to grant the Snope Petition unless they know beforehand that Associate Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett are fully onboard with them.

Worse than not taking up Snope is taking the case up only to have a ruling in Snope that semiautomatic weapons do not fall within the core protection of the Second Amendment. Such a ruling would be catastrophic to the survival of the fundamental, unalienable, natural law right codified in the Second Amendment and, by extension, a negative ruling—one against Petitioners—would be catastrophic for Heller, McDonald, and Bruen as they must be taken as inextricably tied together. If one falls, so do the others.

If the High Court does grant certiorari in Snope vs. Brown and the Court comes down with a clear, emphatic, categorical, and comprehensive ruling that semiautomatic weapons fall within the core of the Second Amendment’s protection, then Snope will become the fourth landmark Second Amendment case.

This ruling will, then, further strengthen the natural law right to armed self-defense, eventually making it impregnable to attack.

Chief Justice John Roberts would go along with this majority even if he would prefer not to. The reason why is this: Roberts would not side with the three Liberal wing minority dissenting Justices in a major Second Amendment case.

Moreover, having previously voted with the Conservative wing in Heller, McDonald, and Bruen, Chief Justice Roberts could not rationally explain away his inconsistency to others, no less to himself, why he would dissent from the majority in Snope. This is why he would prefer voting to deny the Petition and trust that the other nominally Conservative wing Justices as heretofore mentioned, would also vote to deny the granting of Certiorari.

WHY SNOPE IS OF CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE

State governments that detest Heller and McDonald have long frowned on civilian citizen ownership and possession of any class of firearms. These governments particularly detest civilian citizen ownership and possession of semiautomatic firearms, referring to them by erroneous wholly contrived appellations for political purposes, such as “assault weapons” and “weapons of war.”  They do this to create the illusion in the psyche of the public that these weapons are of no useful purpose. Mental laziness among many Americans makes them susceptible to dangerous psychological conditioning.

These Anti-Second Amendment governments thereupon find it relatively easy to enact laws, codes, rules, and regulations aimed at severely constraining or denying outright most civilian citizen possession and ownership of semiautomatic weapons, likening them—erroneously—to fully automatic weapons, or to selective fire weapons, and various other weapons and components of weapons that fall under the purview of the constitutionally dubious National Firearms Act (NFA).

The Snope case isn’t the first case involving a challenge to state government banning of semiautomatic firearms to come before the U.S. Supreme Court. It is simply the most recent.

This matter cane to the fore several years ago. Few people may remember a prior case that landed before the Court, but we would like to jog the memory of those Americans who may have forgotten.

Go back ten years. In 2015, the case Friedman vs. Highland Park came to the Court on a writ of certiorari. The salient issue in that earlier case is the same as in the present case, Snope vs. Brown.

Friedman dealt with the constitutionality of commonly owned semiautomatic weapons.

The Court rejected review of the case, realizing of course that the Court lacked at least five Justices that would vote to strike down a local government’s illegal outright ban on semiautomatic weapons. Justice Thomas was livid, and he wrote a lengthy and vigorous—even scathing—dissenting comment, laying out why the Friedman case ought to have been taken up. Had the Court done so, the American citizenry would have been spared having to suffer, these long years, the continuous barrage sprouted about semiautomatic weapons by the Press, media, and government. Americans would also have been spared having to expend substantial time, exorbitant amounts of money, and considerable effort filing lawsuits challenging unconstitutional firearms laws.

If the Court agrees to hear Snope, all this wasted time, money, and effort could henceforth be avoided.

Likely, John Roberts has Thomas’ dissent fresh in mind and that could be reason enough to encourage denying Petitioners’ writ, in Snope.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia obviously was no less appalled than was Justice Clarence Thomas by Chief Justice Roberts’ and Associate Justice Kennedy’s hesitancy in agreeing to take up the Friedman case.

Friedman could well have become, and should have become, the third Landmark Second Amendment case decision, in 2015, had Roberts and Kennedy agreed to join Scalia, Thomas, and Alito in taking up the case and ruling in favor of Petitioners.

Perhaps Roberts and Kennedy declined to accept review of the case, because, unlike in Heller, they could not perceive a way to dilute a positive ruling in Friedman. The case does not allow for narrowing the holding. Semiautomatic weapons either fall within the core of the Second Amendment’s protection or they do not. If they do fall within the core of the Second Amendment, then these state governments are stopped in their tracks from banning them. The use of rhetorical appellations like “assault weapons” or “weapons of war” to describe them would dissipate into the nothingness from which these rhetorical devices arose.

Unfortunately, Justice Scalia cannot help Justices Thomas and Alito to cajole Chief Justice Roberts and to urge other Justices to take up Snope because fourteen months after the Friedman case fell by the wayside, Scalia would be found dead in a hotel room in Texas, and under most mysterious circumstances, with precious few details ever forthcoming about the nature or cause of death.

JUSTICE THOMAS’ COMMENT IN FRIEDMAN

What did Thomas have to say about Friedman, that Scalia heartily agreed with? Given its similarity to Snope, Thomas’ comment can be lifted almost verbatim and utilized as the ruling in Snope, were the Court to take up the case. We provide Thomas’ dissent in full here.

[O]ur central holding in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637 (2008), was “that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 780, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 177 L. Ed. 2d 894 (2010) (plurality opinion). And in McDonald, we recognized that the Second Amendment applies fully against the States as well as the Federal Government. Id., at 750, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3026, 177 L. Ed. 2d 894, 903; id., at 805, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3058, 177 L. Ed. 2d 894, 938 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment).

Despite these holdings, several Courts of Appeals—including the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the decision below — have upheld categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes. See 784 F. 3d 406, 410-412 (2015). Because noncompliance with our Second Amendment precedents warrants this Court’s attention as much as any of our precedents, I would grant certiorari in this case.”

The city of Highland Park, Illinois, bans manufacturing, selling, giving, lending, acquiring, or possessing many of the most commonly owned semiautomatic firearms, which the City branded “Assault Weapons.” See Highland Park, Ill., City Code §§136.001(C), 136.005 (2015), App. to Pet. for Cert. 65a, 71a. For instance, the ordinance criminalizes modern sporting rifles (e.g., AR-style semiautomatic rifles), which many Americans own for lawful purposes like self-defense, hunting, and target shooting. The City also prohibited “Large Capacity Magazines,” a term the City used to refer to nearly all ammunition feeding devices that “accept more than ten rounds.” §136.001(G), id., at 70a.

The City gave anyone who legally possessed “an Assault Weapon or Large Capacity Magazine” 60 days to move these items outside City limits, disable them, or surrender them for destruction. §136.020, id., at 73a. Anyone who violates the ordinance can be imprisoned for up to six months, fined up to $1,000, or both. §136.999, id., at 74a.

Petitioners — a Highland Park resident who sought to keep now-prohibited firearms and magazines to defend his home, and an advocacy organization — brought a suit to enjoin the ordinance on the ground that it violates the Second Amendment. The District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted summary judgment to the City.

A divided panel of the Seventh Circuit affirmed. The panel majority acknowledged that the prohibited weapons “can be beneficial for self-defense because they are lighter than many rifles and less dangerous per shot than larger-caliber pistols or revolvers,” and thus “[h]ouseholders too frightened or infirm to aim carefully may be able to wield them more effectively.” 784 F. 3d, at 411.

The majority nonetheless found no constitutional problem with the ordinance. It recognized that Heller “holds that a law banning the possession of handguns in the home . . . violates” the Second Amendment. 784 F. 3d, at 407. But beyond Heller’s rejection of banning handguns in the home, the majority believed, Heller and McDonald “leave matters open” on the scope of the Second Amendment. 784 F. 3d, at 412. The majority thus adopted a new test for gauging the constitutionality of bans on firearms: “[W]e [will] ask whether a regulation bans weapons that were common at the time of ratification or those that have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, . . . and whether law-abiding citizens retain adequate means of self-defense.” Id., at 410 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Judge Manion dissented, reasoning that “[b]oth the ordinance and this court’s opinion upholding it are directly at odds with the central holdings of Heller and McDonald.” Id., at 412.
II

The Second Amendment provides: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” We explained in Heller and McDonald that the Second Amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” Heller, supra, at 592, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2797, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 657; see also McDonald, supra, at 767-769, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3036-3037, 177 L. Ed. 2d 894, 914-916. We excluded from protection only “those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Heller, 554 U. S., at 625, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2815, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 677. And we stressed that “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.” Id., at 634, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2821, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 682 (emphasis deleted).

Instead of adhering to our reasoning in Heller, the Seventh Circuit limited Heller to its facts, and read Heller to forbid only total bans on handguns used for self-defense in the home. See 784 F. 3d, at 407, 412. All other questions about the Second Amendment, the Seventh Circuit concluded, should be defined by “the political process and scholarly debate.” Id., at 412. But Heller repudiates that approach. We explained in Heller that “since th[e] case represent[ed] this Court’s first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field.” 554 U. S., at 635, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2821, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 683.We cautioned courts against leaving the rest of the field to the legislative process: “Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad.” Id., at 634-635, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2821, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 683.

Based on its crabbed reading of Heller, the Seventh Circuit felt free to adopt a test for assessing firearm bans that eviscerates many of the protections recognized in Heller and McDonald. The court asked in the first instance whether the banned firearms “were common at the time of ratification” in 1791. 784 F. 3d, at 410. But we said in Heller that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” 554 U. S., at 582, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2792, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 651.

The Seventh Circuit alternatively asked whether the banned firearms relate “to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” 784 F. 3d, at 410 (internal quotation marks omitted). The court concluded that state and local ordinances never run afoul of that objective, since “states, which are in charge of militias, should be allowed to decide when civilians can possess military-grade firearms.” Ibid. But that ignores Heller’s fundamental premise: The right to keep and bear arms is an independent, individual right. Its scope is defined not by what the militia needs, but by what private citizens commonly possess. 554 U. S., at 592, 627-629, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2797, 2817-2818, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 657, 678-680. Moreover, the Seventh Circuit endorsed the view of the militia that Heller rejected. We explained that “Congress retains plenary authority to organize the militia,” not States. Id., at 600, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2802, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 662 (emphasis added). Because the Second Amendment confers rights upon individual citizens—not state governments—it was doubly wrong for the Seventh Circuit to delegate to States and localities the power to decide which firearms people may possess.

Lastly, the Seventh Circuit considered “whether law-abiding citizens retain adequate means of self-defense,” and reasoned that the City’s ban was permissible because “[i]f criminals can find substitutes for banned assault weapons, then so can law-abiding homeowners.” 784 F. 3d, at 410, 411. Although the court recognized that “Heller held that the availability of long guns does not save a ban on handgun ownership,” it thought that “Heller did not foreclose the possibility that allowing the use of most long guns plus pistols and revolvers . . . gives householders adequate means of defense.” Id., at 411.

That analysis misreads Heller. The question under Heller is not whether citizens have adequate alternatives available for self-defense. Rather, Heller asks whether the law bans types of firearms commonly used for a lawful purpose—regardless of whether alternatives exist. 554 U. S., at 627-629, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2817-2818, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 678-680. And Heller draws a distinction between such firearms and weapons specially adapted to unlawful uses and not in common use, such as sawed-off shotguns. Id., at 624-625, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2815-2816, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 676-677. The City’s ban is thus highly suspect because it broadly prohibits common semiautomatic firearms used for lawful purposes. Roughly 5 million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles. See 784 F. 3d, at 415, n. 3. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. See ibid. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons. See McDonald, 561 U. S., at 767-768, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3036-3037, 177 L. Ed. 2d 894, 914-915; Heller, supra, at 628-629, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2817-2818, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 679-680.

The Seventh Circuit ultimately upheld a ban on many common semiautomatic firearms based on speculation about the law’s potential policy benefits. See 784 F. 3d, at 411-412. The court conceded that handguns — not “assault weapons” — “are responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in the United States.” Id., at 409. Still, the court concluded, the ordinance “may increase the public’s sense of safety,” which alone is “a substantial benefit.” Id., at 412. Heller, however, forbids subjecting the Second Amendment’s “core protection . . . to a freestanding ‘interest-balancing’ approach.” Heller, supra, at 634, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2821, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637, 683. This case illustrates why. If a broad ban on firearms can be upheld based on  conjecture that the public might feel safer (while being no safer at all), then the Second Amendment guarantees nothing.
III

The Court’s refusal to review a decision that flouts two of our Second Amendment precedents stands in marked contrast to the Court’s willingness to summarily reverse courts that disregard our other constitutional decisions. E.g., Maryland v. Kulbicki, ante, at 1 (per curiam) (summarily reversing because the court below applied Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668, 104 S. Ct. 2052, 80 L. Ed. 2d 674 (1984), “in name only”); Grady v. North Carolina, 575 U. S. 306 , 135 S. Ct. 1368, 191 L. Ed. 2d 459 (2015) (per curiam) (summarily reversing a judgment inconsistent with this Court’s recent Fourth Amendment precedents); Martinez v. Illinois, 572 U. S. 833, 843 , 134 S. Ct. 2070, 2077, 188 L. Ed. 2d 1112, 1120 (2014) (per curiam) (summarily reversing judgment that rested on an “understandable” double jeopardy holding that nonetheless “r[an] directly counter to our precedents”).

There is no basis for a different result when our Second Amendment precedents are at stake. I would grant certiorari to prevent the Seventh Circuit from relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right.”

WHAT ABOUT THE ANTONYUK CASE THAT IS ALSO PRESENTLY UP FOR A VOTE BY THE COURT ON A PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI?

Apart from Snope, there is another case that, in one important respect, is, at the moment, even more pressing than Snope. The case is Antonyuk vs. James.

While the Snope case flows naturally from Heller from the standpoint of Court meticulously reviewing categories of firearms that fall within the core protection of the Second Amendment, the Antonyuk case addresses a matter that goes directly to the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court as the Third Branch of the Federal Government that the New York State Government openly defies.

The Antonyuk case challenges New York’s defiance to adhere to the Bruen rulings. If the U.S. Supreme Court fails to take up this case, it effectively capitulates to state Governments, allowing them to blatantly ignore High Court rulings they happen to take exception to.

The Court must take up Antonyuk and strike down New York’s amendments to its Handgun Law, for those amendments are patently unconstitutional.

The enforcement of them by New York constitutes a direct attack on the legitimacy of the High Court to have the final word on the meaning and the purport of the Second Amendment.

Both Antonyuk and Snope are extremely important to the inviolability of our natural law rights, and, particularly, that right in our Nation’s Bill of Rights without which a Free Constitutional Republic and a sovereign citizenry cannot truly continue to exist—"the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” a right that “shall not be infringed.”

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