The bottom line
Two of the most important Second Amendment cases in years, Viramontes v. Cook County and Duncan v. Bonta, were relisted again at the January 23rd conference without a grant of cert. The court took a case about digital video privacy instead. It is frustrating. It is also not quite the catastrophe it might look like on the surface, but we need to be honest about what the pattern here is telling us.
This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.
What the court just did
The Supreme Court released its latest order list and the result was the same as it has been for weeks. Viramontes v. Cook County, the challenge to Cook County’s AR-15 ban, and Duncan v. Bonta, the Ninth Circuit case challenging California’s ban on magazines that hold more than ten rounds, were both relisted for conference again. The next conference opportunity is February 20th.
For anyone who has been watching closely, neither of these outcomes was unexpected. The court is typically only going to take two to four Second Amendment cases per term. It already granted cert in Cargill v. Garland’s successor case on the unlawful user question, and it granted cert in Wolford v. Lopez, which was argued on January 20th. Wolford concerns Hawaii’s law requiring affirmative opt-in permission from property owners before a permit holder can carry on private property open to the public. That is real litigation with real stakes, even if it does not generate the same headlines as the AR-15 question.
The case the court chose to take instead of ours is Salazar v. Paramount Global, involving an interpretation of the Video Privacy Protection Act in the context of digital video viewing and data sharing. Whether a streaming service subscriber qualifies as a “consumer” under an act Congress passed in 1988 to protect VHS rental records. That is the case they took.
I am not going to pretend that is not aggravating. But I also want to be honest about the mechanics here, because the relisting pattern is actually worth understanding.
What relisting actually means
When a petition is distributed to conference and then relisted, it does not mean it was denied. It means the justices are holding it for further discussion, sometimes to work through the implications of a pending case, sometimes to write a statement respecting denial, and sometimes because one or more justices are actively circulating a draft dissent from denial.
Viramontes has now been relisted after the December 5th, December 12th, January 9th, January 16th, and January 23rd conferences. Duncan has been relisted even more times. That level of relisting is not normal judicial indifference. You do not relist a case that many times if zero justices care about it.
Under the Roberts Court specifically, extended relisting is common for high-stakes cases where the justices are working through something substantive. The question is whether that means they are building toward a grant or toward a denial with a significant written statement.
Justice Kavanaugh already tipped his hand after Snope v. Brown, Maryland’s assault weapons ban case, was relisted thirteen times before the court ultimately declined to hear it last term. Kavanaugh wrote publicly that “this Court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.” That was a justice telling the country he knows a circuit split on AR-15 bans is untenable and the court will have to address it. He said the same thing again when Viramontes was first distributed. That is not the language of someone who is content to let the issue sit forever.
Why the AR-15 case matters more than anything else on the docket
Cook County’s Blair Holt Assault Weapons Ban prohibits possession, acquisition, and transfer of semiautomatic rifles capable of accepting detachable magazines, and specifically names 125 prohibited rifles including the AR-15. The Seventh Circuit upheld it. The same court that covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin is on record saying the government can ban the most popular rifle in America.
After Bruen in 2022 and the text-and-history test that came with it, that holding is a legal embarrassment. You cannot look at the historical record of American arms bearing and find anything resembling a tradition of banning entire categories of rifles in common use for lawful purposes. The AR-15 is owned by somewhere between 20 and 25 million Americans. The government’s own brief in the Heller case acknowledged that the Second Amendment protects arms in common use. An AR-15 ban fails that test before you even start on the history.
The Seventh Circuit’s decision to uphold Cook County’s ban is in direct tension with how other circuits have applied Bruen. That circuit conflict is exactly the kind of thing the Supreme Court is supposed to resolve. Kavanaugh said so himself.
Duncan v. Bonta is a different kind of case. The Ninth Circuit, in a 7-4 en banc decision on March 20, 2025, upheld California’s ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds. The petition, filed in August 2025, also raises a Takings Clause question, since California has required surrender or removal of previously lawful property without compensation. The legal case for the magazines is, in my view, even more straightforward than the AR-15 case. Standard-capacity magazines are sold with virtually every modern semiautomatic handgun in America. They are the standard. Calling them “large capacity” is a rhetorical trick, not a legal argument. A ban on standard-capacity magazines is a ban on the normal configuration of the most commonly owned defensive firearms in the country.
What the court has been willing to do
I want to give credit where it is due. The current court has moved the Second Amendment forward more in the last five years than the previous five decades combined. Bruen was not a minor clarification. It was a structural overhaul of how every lower court has to evaluate gun regulations. The old means-ends balancing test that let courts rubber-stamp almost any restriction is gone. Courts are now required to ask whether the regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in America. That is a genuinely protective standard.
Wolford v. Lopez, now before the court, is significant. If Hawaii’s “opt-in” carry restriction gets struck down, it puts New York’s similar scheme back in the crosshairs and limits how far states can go in effectively nullifying carry permits through sensitive-place expansions. That matters for millions of people in states that have been dragging their feet on Bruen compliance.
But there is an honest limit to how much credit the court deserves for relisting Viramontes six times and declining to resolve whether states can ban the most popular rifle in the country. At some point, “we’ll get to it next term” becomes its own kind of failure.
The term is not over
The February 20th conference is the next opportunity. There will be more conferences after that. The term runs through late June. A grant before the end of this term would mean oral argument next term, in the fall of 2026, with a decision in 2027. A denial would leave the Cook County ban in place and force gun rights litigants to build the circuit split further before trying again.
My honest read is that at least four justices are interested in taking the AR-15 question. The relisting pattern, combined with Kavanaugh’s public statements, does not look like a court that is indifferent. It looks like a court that is cautious, either waiting for a better vehicle, a cleaner record, or a broader circuit split that makes the case for granting cert undeniable.
None of that changes what is at stake. The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. An AR-15 is an arm. Banning it is unconstitutional. The fact that we are still litigating this in 2026, still waiting on a court to tell us what should be self-evident, is its own kind of indictment of where this country is. But that court has done more for our rights than any institution in recent memory. The pressure now is to make sure the next grant goes our way.
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