In Maryland, you cannot easily or – in most cases – legally own an AR15 rifle – all thanks to an arbitrary set of rules that classify certain firearms as “Assault Weapons” in The Firearms Safety Act of 2013.
You can hop over to Tactical Gear to see a comprehensive list of the effected firearms.
The law faces many challenges, and recently the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the US Supreme Court to review the case.
As explained by Alan Gottlieb, founder of SAF:
“We are pursuing this case because it is long past time for the Supreme Court to put an end to the legal gymnastics that have been used to uphold what amounts to an unconstitutional prohibition of semiautomatic firearms,” said SAF founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb.
“Lower courts have perpetuated such bans based on whatever logic they can conjure up to justify their decisions,” Gottlieb added. “The Second Amendment is not going to disappear, and questions about what arms are protected need to be answered. You cannot allow guns to be banned based on cosmetics or what color they are.”
From NationalInterest.org
The brief itself can be found here.
The SAF/CCRKBA brief pulls no punches. Eight pages in, it notes bluntly, “Maryland dubs a semiautomatic firearm that possesses one of the prohibited features an ‘assault weapon,' but that is nothing more than argument advanced by a political slogan in the guise of a definition. As even anti-gun partisans have admitted, ‘assault weapon' is a political term designed to exploit ‘the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons.'
From Ammoland News
Gottlieb and his groups (both SAF and CCRKBA) have spent decades protecting 2nd Amendment rights – largely through the courts by supporting cases and bringing suits of their own to challenge unconstitutional gun laws across the nation.
This recent filing comes after many high-profile legal cases this year, including the ruling in California likening the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife – that is, a firearm that is incredibly versatile – and struck down a law similar to Maryland's law in California.
Regarding “ public confusion” as the thing is described, I tend to wonder as to who is actually confused. Is it the previously referenced “public”, or is it media, or the so cal3d “public servants”, who have consumed an excess of anti constitutional rights opium.