Relatives of Sandy Hook victims ask Supreme Court to preserve rifle bans

Justices set Dec. 2 oral arguments in two rifle-ban appeals

Relatives of people killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting filed a friend-of-the-court brief Wednesday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold state and local bans on semiautomatic rifles, citing the high body counts and devastating injuries the weapons can inflict. The parents of five of the 20 first-graders killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, shooting and relatives of one of six educators who died joined the filing, which weighs in on two cases challenging bans in Connecticut and the Chicago area. The justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments in both cases Dec. 2.

“The assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School, carried out by an untrained, 112-pound youth armed with an AR-15-style rifle, is graphic proof of the unusual and extreme lethality of that firearm and the harm it is capable of inflicting on American communities,” the relatives’ filing says. They wrote that they “seek to protect other American families from becoming casualties in another AR-15 killing spree.”

More than 40 other people and groups — most in favor of the rifle bans — also filed amicus briefs Wednesday, filings submitted by parties who are not directly involved in the litigation.

The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, shot his way into the locked school in Newtown and fired more than 150 bullets in about four minutes with a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle fueled by high-capacity ammunition magazines, killing 26 people. The shooting led Connecticut to ban such rifles in 2013 — the same law now before the Supreme Court.

Jennifer Hensel, whose 6-year-old daughter Avielle Richman was killed, is quoted in the filing saying Avielle was shot multiple times in the face and that authorities told her she would not recognize her daughter if she saw her body. “A moral imperative is truly at hand,” Hensel said in supporting the bans. “Please, do not allow more blood to soak our Connecticut soil from assault-style weapons. A fundamental duty to protect all in Connecticut is at stake.”

A separate brief filed Wednesday by Sandy Hook Promise, the gun violence prevention group started by Newtown families, said 6-year-old Dylan Hockley was shot five times — “his body destroyed so completely, his mother was told not to touch him to say goodbye as he lay in his coffin.” “The effects of these weapons on children’s bodies are catastrophic and obscene,” the filing said. Dylan’s mother, Nicole Hockley, a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, said in a statement: “I know firsthand the devastation a semiautomatic rifle can inflict in minutes on the bodies, hearts, and minds of children — and the families who love them. No family should have to live with that pain. As the Court considers this case, the consequences being experienced by children and communities cannot be an afterthought.”

Gun rights advocates and the groups whose lawsuits produced the two cases argue that banning semiautomatic rifles — legally owned by millions of Americans — violates the Second Amendment. They say they sympathize with gun violence victims’ families and condemn mass shootings, but the solution is not to curtail Second Amendment rights. Supporters of the bans say the rifles were designed for military use, are too dangerous for civilians and should be regulated like machine guns. Konstadinos Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, a plaintiff in the challenges to both the Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois, bans, said school shootings happen despite such laws.

“Solving or at least mitigating school shootings is not about banning a type of gun,” Moros said in an email to The Associated Press. “While some guns are obviously more capable than others, school shooters inflict harm not because of the capability of their firearms, but because of the helplessness of their targets.” He said “the real solution lies in proper school security,” which can both more quickly respond to shootings and deter attacks from happening in the first place, “given that the depraved individuals who commit these sorts of crimes tend to pick ‘soft targets.’”

The court announced in June that it would hear appeals challenging bans on the AR-15 and similar semiautomatic firearms in Connecticut and the Chicago area. Cook County’s ban was first passed in 1993, and lower courts have upheld both laws. Similar laws are in place in about a dozen states, covering major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Congress allowed a national assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, and Democrats have supported renewing it in response to mass shootings; states including Virginia and Rhode Island have recently passed their own measures. The cases are the latest high-profile gun dispute to reach the court since its conservative majority issued a landmark 2022 ruling that expanded Second Amendment rights, spawned challenges to firearm laws around the country and said gun laws must have a strong grounding in the nation’s historical traditions.