Daily Caller News Foundation

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) petitioned the Supreme Court Tuesday to take a case involving a stun gun ban, accusing a federal appeals court of flouting a decade-old ruling by the high court.

The Supreme Court ruled in Caetano v. Massachusetts that a ban on stun guns was unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds in a unanimous per curiam (unsigned) ruling released on March 21, 2016. SAF referenced the 2016 decision at the opening of its petition for a writ of certiorari.

“This case essentially is Caetano 2.0. In Caetano v. Massachusetts, this Court summarily vacated a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision denying Second Amendment protection to stun guns that blatantly ‘contradict this Court’s precedent,’” SAF said in the petition. “The decision below similarly flouted this Court’s precedent to reject a challenge to a ban on stun guns.”

Second Amendment Foundation Senior Director of Legal Operations William Sack told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which includes the state of New York, “sidestepped” the high court’s 2016 decision.

“What the Second Circuit did was they took the common use test that belongs in the second step and they moved it to the first step,” Sack said. “So what they said was the Second Amendment plain text is only implicated if you’re talking about arms in common use. That is wrong.”

In his opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s per curiam ruling, Associate Justice Samuel Alito noted that “hundreds of thousands” of stun guns were sold across dozens of states.

“While less popular than handguns, stun guns are widely owned and accepted as a legitimate means of self-defense across the country,” Alito wrote. “Massachusetts’ categorical ban of such weapons therefore violates the Second Amendment.”

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Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

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