President Donald Trump just posted on Truth Social — reposting a prediction by the Department of Justice’s own top civil rights lawyer — that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon declare AR-15 bans unconstitutional everywhere in America. That is not a fringe commentator speaking. That is the sitting president amplifying his own Assistant Attorney General. This is a genuinely historic moment for the Second Amendment, and it deserves to be unpacked carefully.
What Trump Posted — and Who Said It
The inciting event was a statement by Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General heading the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, given to John Solomon on Just the News, No Noise. Dhillon predicted that the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Denver’s “assault weapon” ban will eventually produce a Supreme Court ruling legalizing the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle nationwide. Trump reposted Solomon’s article about that interview, headline and all: “Top DOJ official predicts Supreme Court will declare AR-15 rifles legal everywhere in America.”
I want you to understand the significance of that. The president of the United States has publicly aligned himself with the position that AR-15 bans are unconstitutional and that SCOTUS needs to say so clearly. That is a 180-degree turn from where the executive branch stood just a few years ago.
Harmeet Dhillon’s Legal Argument — and Why She’s Right
In her interview on The Joe Pags Show, Dhillon made the constitutional case directly. She cited District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), for the proposition that the government cannot prevent a law-abiding citizen from possessing a firearm in the home, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), for establishing the shall-issue regime for public carry and, more importantly, the text-history-tradition test that now governs all Second Amendment claims.
Her point — and mine — is that once you apply the Heller/Bruen test faithfully, “assault weapon” bans cannot survive. There is no historical tradition from the Founding era of banning an entire category of commonly owned arms unless those arms are “dangerous and unusual.” The AR-15 semi-automatic rifle is the most popular rifle in the United States. Under Heller and Bruen, that fact alone is decisive.
Dhillon also noted that this is the first time in American history that the DOJ has stood firmly on the side of citizens in enforcing the Second Amendment. I have been arguing for years that this was the missing piece. The courts need good briefing. The government filing amicus briefs and original lawsuits on the right side changes the entire litigation landscape.
The Lawsuits on the Ground
The DOJ’s Second Amendment Section — led by Dhillon and Barry Arrington, a prominent Second Amendment litigator who previously served as Chief Legal Counsel for the National Association for Gun Rights — has already filed multiple lawsuits. It sued Denver over the city’s 1989 ordinance banning possession of semi-automatic rifles including AR-15s. It filed a separate lawsuit against the state of Colorado over the state’s large-capacity magazine ban, C.R.S. § 18-12-302. And back in late December 2025 it filed suit against the District of Columbia, which effectively bans semi-automatic firearms by refusing to register them.
My old fellow NYU Law student Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, will be defending those bans in court. I wish him luck — he’ll need it. The DOJ has the Bruen test on its side, and these laws have no serious historical pedigree.
The DOJ’s own website now describes the Second Amendment Section’s mission in unmistakable terms:
“The 2nd Amendment section will work diligently to investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights, as well as be proactive in searching for litigation opportunities to secure such rights.”
That sentence would have been unthinkable under any prior administration. It is now official DOJ policy.
The Overton Window Has Moved in Favor of the Second Amendment
The Overton window — the range of ideas politically and legally acceptable at any given moment — has shifted dramatically in favor of the Second Amendment. A year ago, no one in the executive branch was saying publicly that SCOTUS should strike down AR-15 bans nationwide. Today it is DOJ policy, amplified directly by the president. The anti-gun movement has spent billions trying to cement these bans. If the Supreme Court throws them out, all of that falls apart.
That day is coming. The trend is our friend. For those of you living in blue jurisdictions behind these bans, you now have a very powerful friend at the DOJ — and a U.S. Supreme Court that has the legal tools and precedents to finish this fight for good.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.