The Second Amendment Wars Are Being Fought in Three Circuit Courts

The building most people should watch is not in Washington. As of this review, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear exactly two pending firearms cases. Everything else — every ban, every permitting regime, every age restriction under challenge — is churning through the courts of appeals, and nearly a third of it is churning through just three of them.

The concentration

Our tracker holds 148 firearms cases across every level of the federal system. Of those, 46 sit in three circuits: the Ninth with 18, the Second with 17, and the Seventh with 11.

The concentration is not a statistical accident. The Ninth covers California, the Second covers New York, and the Seventh covers Illinois — the three states whose legislatures passed the broadest post-Bruen restrictions, which made them the natural plaintiffs’ market. Add the Fourth and Tenth Circuits (eight and five cases) and the map of the litigation is essentially the map of the most restrictive states.

The two cases that did make it

Certiorari was granted on 30 June 2026 in Grant v. Higgins (No. 25-566) and Viramontes v. Cook County (No. 25-238), consolidated on the question presented in No. 25-238. Higgins is the live docket caption; Rovella is the former officeholder on the BIO.

Read the grant carefully. The Court took one question: whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15-platform and similar semiautomatic rifles. Cook County’s ordinance and Connecticut’s statute also regulate magazines. Those facts are in the cases. They are not in the question the Court accepted. Eighteen magazine-capacity cases remain in the tracker for that reason.

The Court did not take a licensing case, a sensitive-places case or an age case. After Bruen was widely read as a signal that the whole field was coming up, the actual behavior is narrower: one clean “in common use” question, and everything else left to cook.

What the subject counts actually say

Sort the tracker by subject and the picture sharpens:

• Carry, 37 cases — the most-litigated subject, inherited from the post-2022 fight over what “carry” means.
• Assault-weapons bans, 22 — the subject now at the Court, on the rifle question only.
• Licensing, 21 and prohibited-persons, 21.
• Magazine capacity, 18 — technically distinct from assault-weapons bans and almost always joined to them in the same statutes. Not granted here.
• Dealer regulation, 16 and sensitive places, 15.
• NFA, 9; age restrictions, 7; self-manufacture, 6; ammunition, 4; non-resident, 3; waiting periods, 3 — the long tail.

That last line deserves emphasis. Self-manufacture — printed and home-built firearms, including file-distribution theories tagged under that subject — generates six tracked cases total. There is no separate “file-distribution” label in the tracker. The subject may be one of the loudest gun topics on the internet, and it is barely litigated.

Why the circuits matter more than the headlines

The practical consequence of Supreme Court restraint is that the law of the Second Amendment is currently the law of the circuits. A magazine ban can be lawful in one part of the country and unlawful in another, with the Supreme Court having declined, so far, to say who is right. Grant / Viramontes may settle the rifle question nationally — or produce a decision narrow enough to leave the other splits standing. In the meantime, the cases worth watching are the filings in the Ninth, Second and Seventh, because that is where the next Supreme Court case is being assembled.

The full docket — every case, court, subject tag and verdict — is maintained in the case tracker, with the Supreme Court’s own docket on the SCOTUS page.