On Wednesday, Cam took apart the court decision that upheld the Maryland assault weapon ban. It was an idiotic ruling based on flawed…well, I can’t call that “reasoning.” Rationalizing is probably far more accurate. Honestly, it’s just bad.

For folks in Maryland, particularly gun rights advocates, it was a terrible setback.

However, we all know that it’ll be appealed, and that appeal may well be setting the stage to drop this at the Supreme Court’s feet.

Even MSNBC legal writer Jordan Rubin seems to think so.

The Supreme Court declined to further expand gun rights this past term in the Rahimi case, when a lopsided majority (over Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent) upheld firearms restrictions for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. But a new federal appeals court ruling on assault weapons could prompt another test for the justices.

In that ruling on Tuesday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved Maryland’s assault weapons ban. The appeals court said the state “was well within its constitutional prerogative to legislate as it did,” despite the Supreme Court’s gun rights expansion in the 2022 Bruen ruling. The high court’s Republican-appointed majority said in that decision that gun regulations can only survive Second Amendment challenges if they’re consistent with the nation’s historical traditions.

Gun rights groups have vowed to take this one, and considering how much that ruling doesn’t pay attention to Bruen, it seems very plausible that the court will want to make a ruling.

A year ago, I’d have welcomed this as great news, but after Rahimi, I’m not so sure.

Granted, Rahimi was a different case entirely. Zachy Rahimi wasn’t exactly anyone’s preferred poster boy for gun rights. He is or was, by all indications, a garbage human being who enjoyed inflicting violence on others. It’s kind of hard to look at someone like that and make a pro-gun ruling.

Yet it was an 8-1 ruling. I expected it to go against us, but not by that much.

While an assault weapon ban is a different matter, one has to wonder if we really have enough justices to win this one. If we lose, then assault weapon bans are fair game all across the nation. The “it’s unconstitutional” argument might still be right, but as far as the courts would have ruled, it doesn’t matter. Winning would be huge, but so could losing.

And can we win?

Probably. This isn’t quite the same thing as allowing someone like Rahimi to have a gun after beating his girlfriend and while committing a number of other crimes. This is about lawful gun ownership by ordinary citizens who aren’t doing anything wrong. I’d like to think that the justices would look at it differently, and I know that at least some of them most definitely will.

Is it enough? Hopefully. Probably, even.

And if there is a hope in hell of winning, we should probably go for it. When you balance the risks, we’re not really risking all that much–yes, I make the case that we could lose big, but that’s in the abstract. After all, most jurisdictions that are inclined to pass an assault weapon ban already have. We’ve staved off a new one at the federal level through politics, not the courts. We can probably keep that up if we had to.

But the chances that we may never have to again are worth risking it.