Photo taken with mobile phone on June 13, 2016 shows a customer looking on an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at a shop in Orlando, the United States. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
WASHINGTON, June 20 (Xinhua) - The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a state law banning many semiautomatic rifles in both New York and Connecticut, a week after Orlando "lone wolf" Omar Mateen used a similar assault rifle killing 49 and wounding 53 in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
The rebuff, marking the second time since December that the Supreme Court has refused to weigh in assault-weapon bans, is seen as part of a trend in which the justices have given at least tacit approval to broad gun-control laws in states and localities that choose to enact them, said local media reports.
The Super Court has not taken up a gun-rights case since it threw out a Chicago handgun ban in 2010, despite repeated efforts by gun-rights advocates to get the high court to expand protections under the Second Amendment.
New York and Connecticut enacted laws that make it a crime to sell or possess assault weapons in 2013, a year after the mass shooting left 20 children and six adult staff dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It lists 183 specific prohibited weapons.
Amid a national debate on gun control intensified after the Orlando shooting, U.S. President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have called for reinstatement of the federal assault-weapon ban, which expired in 2004. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump says he is opposed, although he supported a ban in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve."
The Connecticut law lists 183 specific prohibited weapons. New York' s law is similar, though it doesn't list specific firearms.
Mateen used a Sig Sauer MCX rifle as well as a handgun in the Orlando shooting. Although the MCX isn't explicitly listed as banned in either state, it is said that the laws are worded broadly enough to potentially cover the weapons.
