...In 2008, not long after the Supreme Court struck down its much stronger gun regulations, the District of Columbia passed an emergency law that, among other things, banned assault rifles and high-capacity magazines within the District. The law was challenged, and the challenge eventually reached a panel of three Republican appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Two of those judges upheld the law.
The third judge was Kavanaugh. In his dissent, Kavanaugh called for a sweeping expansion of the Second Amendment, beyond even what his two Republican colleagues were willing to endorse. Regarding assault rifles, the future Trump appointee argued that these weapons should enjoy the same nearly unassailable level of level of constitutional protection the Supreme Court afforded to handguns in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.
“In Heller,” Kavanuagh wrote in his dissent, “the Supreme Court held that handguns – the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic – are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens.” He claimed that “there is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles.”
The D.C. Circuit case, which involved many of the same parties as the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision, was called Heller v. District of Columbia....