Common use comes to December:

If lawmakers really want fewer murders, the hard work is somewhere else. It’s in the neighborhoods where so many of our homicides happen. It’s in broken families, missing fathers, and mental illness. If you tackle the underlying causes of homicide and drug deaths, you would also influence the mass shooting issue. Extremely rarely do lawmakers tackle these hard issues. A rifle ban is faster. You get a signing ceremony and a press release. Fixing the real problems takes a generation, and nobody gets a ribbon cutting for that.

The principle the founding era left us still works. Punish misuse, and leave the arm alone. A man who murders with a rifle should go to prison. A man who keeps one in his safe and takes it to the range on Saturday has done nothing wrong. A ban punishes the second man for what the first man did, and it multiplies that by 26 million.

On December 2 and 3, the Supreme Court will hear these cases. The Second Amendment isn’t what’s on trial. These bans are. The question is whether they can pass the test the Court has already written. And it’s whether the Court meant what it said in Heller, in Caetano, in Bruen, and in Wolford. I think it did.

Cook County and Connecticut picked this hill. They picked one of the most popular rifles in America, from a category the FBI ties to only a small share of the murders it counts. They picked a test the Court already wrote, and they asked it to look the other way. In December, we find out whether that hill holds.

Fortunately, with this court, it’s quite unlikely to.