Sam Alito is Locked and Loaded . . . and He is Not Going Anywhere
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Below is my column in The Hill on the announcement from Justice SamuelAlito that he is sticking around. Even a cursory review of the docket explains why Alito is not eager to depart despite the wishful thinking of folks at National Public Radio.Here is the column:
Justice Samuel Alito is not done yet.
A month after National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg announced that Sam Alito was retiring (a story NPR later had to retract),the 76-year-old jurist told the Wall Street Journal in an interview, “Obviously, I’m here for another term.”
Looking at the docket for the coming term, it is easy to see why. Even after overturning Roe v. Wade and other historic opinions,Alito still has unfinished business. An example can be found in two cases involving bans on semiautomatic rifleslike the AR-15 that are now awaiting argument in the October term.
Many of us have been frustrated by the Court’s failure to address these laws barring AR-15s and other weapons. Just last year, the Supreme Court declined review of such a Maryland law.Alito and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they wanted to hear the case, falling just one vote short of granting certiorari.
Notably,the required fourth vote could have come from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who called the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Snopes v. Brown “questionable” and added that the Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”
Now, it will.
Democrats are moving in various states to ban the nation’s most popular rifle (the AR-15) and its most popular handgun (the semiautomatic 9mm). Some of us view these laws as presumptively unconstitutional.
In 2008, the court declared in its opinion inHeller that gun ownership is an individual right. The court emphasized how these weapons were in common use and not the type of dangerous or unusual weapon that would fall outside of the Second Amendment. Handguns, the opinion reads, “are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
In 2022, the Court held in the Bruen case that the government bears the burden of demonstrating thatany restriction upon the right to keep and bear arms “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The banson Glock handguns and semiautomatic riflesare efforts to achieve indirectly what the Supreme Court barred directly. In Virginia, Gov. AbigailSpanberger (D) immediately moved against gun rights after her election.Ironically, her election not only spurred a massive surge in gun purchases, but she then supplied the lead line of briefs challenging the law.
Spanberger admitted that the state law she signed would ban commonly used hunting guns.
In what is known as the court’s “clean-up conference,” the justices granted review in Illinois and Connecticut cases challenging bans on semiautomatic rifles.
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/08/10/sam-alito-is-lock-and-loaded-and-he-is-not-going-anywhere/