It’s hard to guess what led the Supreme Court to punt on the question of the legality of one of the country’s most popular firearms, the AR-15, which the National Rifle Association dubs “America’s Rife.” The high court’s punt was declining to hear a dispute over Maryland’s ban on the arm. At least there’s Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s assurance that the court is likely to “address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”

The sooner the better, we say. Americans own between 20 million and 30 million AR–15s, per Justice Kavanaugh. He notes that the rifles are “legal in 41 of the 50 States,” making Maryland “something of an outlier.” Justice Clarence Thomas is more blunt in his dissent from the court’s failure to take up the case now. He  points to the incongruity of the Old Line State banning ownership of “the most popular civilian rifle in America.”

Yet lower courts upheld Maryland’s ban, with the Fourth United States Appeals Circuit “reasoning that AR–15s are not ‘arms’ protected by the Second Amendment,” Justice Thomas says. He calls that a “surprising conclusion.” The Bruen precedent, he adds, would require Maryland to show that its law conforms to the “historical tradition of firearm regulation,” and “it is difficult to see how” the AR-15 ban “passes muster under this framework.”

Quoth Justice Thomas: “I would not wait to decide whether the government can ban the most popular rifle in America.” The question, he avers, “is of critical importance to tens of millions of law-abiding AR-15 owners throughout the country.” Yet the high court has “avoided deciding it for a full decade.” Maryland’s law dates to 2013, when it was enacted in the aftermath of the school shooting at Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

That underscores the tendency, fanned by anti-gun activists and the liberal press, to push for Second Amendment limits after high-profile shooting incidents. What’s the logic, though, of making law on the basis of such anomalies, as horrifying as they are? Firearms were used in some 79 percent of the nearly 23,000 murders in America in 2023, the Pew Research Center reports, yet just 105 of those deaths stemmed from “active shooter incidents.”

Firearms researcher John Lott reminds us, too, that rifles, per se, like the AR-15, are involved in only a fraction of these incidents. His analysis of such shooting incidents taking place between 1998 and 2024 finds that in only 17.3 percent of them did the perpetrator use “only rifles of any type.” More than half — 51.9 percent — “used solely handguns.” If this research is any guide, legislators’ focus on the AR-15 would appear to be misplaced.

“Any type of rifle accounts for less than 3% of murders in the U.S.,” Mr. Lott tells us, “and that share fell as ownership of AR-15s and AK-47s has increased.” He adds that between 1994 and 2004, when the so-called assault weapon ban was in effect via federal law, “the percentage of mass shootings involving assault weapons actually rose, then declined after the ban expired.” These findings serve to undermine the rationale for legislative bans on firearms.

After all, such infringements on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms serve primarily to impede the liberties of law-abiding citizens — not the criminals from whom the citizenry are seeking a measure of protection by owning and carrying a gun. That’s why, Justice Thomas concludes, “Our Constitution allows the American people — not the government — to decide which weapons are useful for self-defense.”