SAF’s Kostas Moros Answers Everytown and Cook County With Founders, Judges, and 1800s Schoolbooks
Key Takeaways
- The Second Amendment Foundation released a factsheet by Kostas Moros arguing that arms fit for militia service and war are constitutionally protected.
- Everytown for Gun Safety, Cook County, and two municipal groups filed Supreme Court briefs calling AR-15 platform rifles weapons of war outside Second Amendment protection.
- The SAF factsheet cites two dozen historical sources from 1765 to 1898, including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and multiple state supreme courts.
- A 1897 quote from Henry Campbell Black states citizens have the right to keep arms of modern warfare at all times.
- SAF argues that calling common rifles weapons of war confirms why they are protected by the Second Amendment, not why they can be banned.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
BELLEVUE, WA — Everytown for Gun Safety, two municipal groups, and Cook County are all telling the U.S. Supreme Court that the AR-15 is a “weapon of war.” A new factsheet from the Second Amendment Foundation takes that label and turns it around. It argues that for more than a century, American courts and commentators said arms were protected precisely because they were fit for militia service and war.
The factsheet is dated October 2026 and was prepared by Kostas Moros, SAF’s Director of Legal Research & Education. Its title is “The Second Amendment Protects Arms Useful to the Common Defense and Resisting Tyranny,” and it covers historical commentary from 1765 to 1898.
The claim
The factsheet opens with the other side’s own words, drawn from briefs filed in Supreme Court case No. 25-238. Some of those briefs are friend-of-the-court briefs, filed by outside groups that are not parties to the case. In its brief, Everytown wrote that “[d]emocratically elected government bodies can keep these weapons of war out of our communities.” The National League of Cities and IMLA argued that “[w]eapons of war… are not within Second Amendment protections.”
Cook County’s own brief as a party goes further, according to the factsheet. It calls AR-15 platform weapons “offensive weapons of war designed for maximum lethality” that “are not customarily used for self-defense.” The factsheet also cites the 7th Circuit’s 2023 decision in Bevis v. City of Naperville, which stated that “[m]ilitary weapons lie outside the class of Arms to which the individual right applies.”
The record
SAF answers with history. In 1840, Justice Joseph Story of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that “[t]he right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.”
In 1871, the Supreme Court of Tennessee was blunter in Andrews v. State: “[T]he rifle of all descriptions, the shot gun, the musket, and repeater, are such arms; and… the right to keep such arms, can not be infringed or forbidden by the Legislature.”
Christopher G. Tiedeman wrote in 1886 that “[n]o binding law can be passed by Congress or by a State legislature, prohibiting altogether the carrying of weapons of warfare.” In 1897, Henry Campbell Black, author of Black’s Law Dictionary, put it plainly: “The ‘arms’ here meant are those of a soldier…. The citizen has at all times the right to keep arms of modern warfare.”
The factsheet also places the AR-15 at the end of a timeline of rifles. The line runs from the Brown Bess flintlock musket of the 1770s to the Sharps breech-loader of the 1850s, the 1873 Winchester lever-action, the 1936 M1 Garand, and then the AR-15, from the 1960s to today.
Its conclusion is direct. Calling common rifles “weapons of war” “does not remove them from the Second Amendment’s scope,” the factsheet says. Instead, it “further confirms why they are protected by it.”
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- 13 Judges to 3: Fifth Circuit Tosses Everytown-Backed Challenge to Texas Gun Signs
- Maryland AG Joins 18 Other Attorneys General Urging Supreme Court to Uphold AR-15 Bans in Cook County and Connecticut Ahead of Dec. 2 Arguments
Those four quotes are a sample. The full factsheet carries two dozen historical quotations, from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers to state supreme courts and 19th-century civics schoolbooks. Each one is tied to a clickable source on page two. For deeper reading, SAF points to “Restrictions ‘Our Ancestors Would Never Have Accepted’: The Historical Case Against Assault Weapon Bans,” by C.D. Michel and Moros, in the Wyoming Law Review (2024). It also cites Robert Leider’s forthcoming Notre Dame Law Review article, “The Individual Right to Bear Arms for Common Defense.”
I will continue tracking the case as it moves through the Supreme Court.
Read the original story: SAF’s Kostas Moros Answers Everytown and Cook County With Founders, Judges, and 1800s Schoolbooks