Two firearms and ballistics experts and several law professors who teach and write about the Second Amendment have filed an amicus brief, on which I’m lead counsel, with the U.S. Supreme Court in two critically important cases challenging bans on so-called “assault weapons,” including the widely popular AR-15 rifle.
The ballistics experts are J. Buford Boone III and Gary K. Roberts. Boone is a retired Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He had primary oversight of the FBI Ballistic Research Facility from 1997-2012. Dr. Roberts is an oral surgeon and Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University Medical Center. He served on the Joint Service Wound Ballistic Integrated Product Team and was a consultant to the Joint FBI-USMC munitions testing program. He has performed military, law enforcement, and privately-funded wound ballistic testing and analysis.
The law professors are Randy Barnett (Georgetown), Robert Cottrol (George Washington), Lee Francis (Widener), Nicholas Johnson (Fordham), Joe Muha (Akron), Joseph Olson (Mitchell-Hamline, emeritus), Michael O’Shea (Oklahoma City), and Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee).
The Supreme Court will hear the consolidated cases of Viramontes v. Cook County, Illinois from the Seventh Circuit and Grant v. Higgins from the Second Circuit. Both lower courts upheld the bans, calling the AR-15 and similar rifles “unusually dangerous” military-grade weapons useful only in war and by mass shooters.
The Second Circuit described the banned rifles “dramatically and reliably lethal” and claimed that the AR-15 is capable of “spray firing,” inflicts wounds the size of a “Coke can,” fires bullets that penetrate walls more than handguns, and is unsuitable for self-defense. The court held that Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban is consistent with the nation’s tradition of prohibiting “unusually dangerous” weapons.
The Seventh Circuit in Viramontes reaffirmed its earlier decision in Bevis v. City of Naperville, which described the AR-15 as a “militaristic weapon” that fires “300 rounds a minute” and can inflict “grisly damage.” It declared the banned rifles are not protected “arms” because they are “indistinguishable” from military machine guns.
The amicus brief argues that the lower courts have offered inflated rates of fire, false assertions about overpenetration, misleading analogies to handguns, and hyperbolic descriptions of wounds to prove that the AR-15 and similar rifles are super-dangerous—too powerful and rapid-fire for citizens to have. To the contrary, the banned rifles are not machine guns—they fire at the same rate as common handguns. The rifles fire the same bullets, at the same velocity, as any other non-banned rifle of the same caliber. The wounds they cause are generally less severe than wounds from other common long guns.
The amicus brief makes the point that previous litigation has focused on the wounding capacity of the .223/5.56 AR-15, yet these bans are not caliber specific and include all AR-15-type rifles, even those chambered for handgun and rimfire cartridges. The fact that the banned rifles are produced in so many different calibers renders impossible the “unusually dangerous” generalization from being meaningfully applied to AR-15 platform and similar rifles. For example, no serious argument can be made that banned rifles chambered in .22LR or common handgun calibers are “unusually dangerous” compared to other common firearms.
Unless used as a club, firearms themselves do not cause injuries; rather, the projectiles they fire do. The only relevant feature about the gun is its ability to launch projectiles quickly and accurately. Beyond that, it’s about the bullet, not the gun. The challenged statutes define the banned firearms by their features, but detachable magazines, pistol grips, telescoping stocks, barrel shrouds, and flash hiders have absolutely no effect on the terminal performance of a projectile.
The amicus brief focuses on the terminal performance and wounding effects of the banned rifles’ projectiles. It exposes the exaggerated claims made by lower courts and ban proponents that catastrophic wounds from AR-15 .223/5.56 rifles are commonplace—holes the sizes of Coke cans, exit wounds a foot wide, amputations of limbs, decapitations, severing of human bodies, and so on. It shows that injuries caused by bullets fired from AR-15s and similar rifles vary significantly and do not routinely produce the gruesome results described in lower court opinions. AR-15 platform weapons possess no more or less potential to cause injury than non-banned semiautomatic, lever-action, pump-action, or bolt-action rifles chambered for the same caliber with similar barrel characteristics.
The brief is designed to assist the Supreme Court to better understanding how AR-15 platform rifles operate, the wounding potential of the ammunition they fire, and why they are not “unusually dangerous” when compared to other firearms. It can be downloaded at the Supreme Court’s website.
