#USA #DC – The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops weighed in on a pair of high-profile Second Amendment cases at the Supreme Court last week, urging the justices to leave room for counties and states to restrict certain firearms within their own jurisdictions.
The conference filed an amicus brief in the consolidated cases Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins. Those disputes challenged Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut bans on more than 100 types of semi-automatic rifles, including AR-15-style firearms, along with related magazine restrictions. Plaintiffs argued the bans violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments and asked the Court to resolve conflicting lower-court rulings after New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
The bishops formally took no position on whether the specific ordinances and statutes were constitutional. They asked the Court, however, to decide the cases in a manner that preserved “the traditional authority of political communities to regulate weapons capable of exceptional violence and that threaten the public peace.”
Their brief cited three principles it said were present in both American constitutional tradition and Catholic teaching: a genuine but limited right of self-defense; the government’s duty to promote the common good and public safety; and the autonomy of local communities—federalism, which the Church described as subsidiarity. The conference argued that a uniform constitutional standard did not require uniform firearm policy nationwide and that history showed communities had long calibrated weapons rules to local conditions.
The bishops also contended that ownership numbers alone should not place an entire category of weapons “constitutionally and irrevocably beyond all regulation.” They described modern semi-automatic rifles as fundamentally different from 18th-century arms and suggested such weapons could be treated as dangerous and unusual in some settings.
The filing aligned with the conference’s earlier public positions. For years the USCCB had supported an assault-weapons ban, limits on high-capacity magazines, universal background checks, and other restrictions while affirming a right of self-defense. In 2023 the conference had filed a brief in United States v. Rahimi backing a federal ban on firearm possession by people subject to domestic-violence restraining orders; the Court later upheld that statute.
Gun-rights advocates criticized the new brief. They noted that the bishops claimed neutrality while asking the Court to reject a strict “common use” test that would protect widely owned rifles. Some pointed out that attorneys from a firm that had worked with gun-control groups helped prepare the filing. Supporters of the brief said it simply defended local democratic authority and the protection of innocent life.
The Supreme Court had not yet issued a decision. The cases were expected to test how far Bruen’s historical-tradition standard would extend to contemporary semi-automatic rifles already in common civilian use.
Cover Image: Offices of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.
