(DCNF)—The opening salvo of a Second Amendment case centered on bans of modern semiautomatic firearms landed Friday afternoon at the United States Supreme Court.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on Friday filed its opening brief in Cutberto Viramontes, et al. v. Cook County, Illinois, et al., a lawsuit seeking to invalidate a local ban on so-called “assault weapons” passed by the defendant in 2006. The brief, while noting the popularity of AR-15-style rifles, argues the appellate courts that heard both the Viramontes case and a similar case involving Connecticut’s ban on modern semiautomatic firearms failed to properly apply the Supreme Court’s Heller and Bruen cases, which upheld Second Amendment rights to bear arms.
“Since Heller, the Court has continued to make clear that firearms are arms under the plain text of the Second Amendment,” the brief states. “In Bruen, for instance, the Court explained that the Second Amendment’s text covers all ‘instruments that facilitate armed self-defense,’ regardless of when they were invented.”
“Anti-gun states, relying on circuit courts that are hostile to the Second Amendment, have long gotten away with unserious arguments in AWB cases,” SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Konstadinos Moros told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That tactic was always only going to work until the Supreme Court finally decided to take on the issue itself. That time has come, and our opening brief lays out the arguments that we believe will be adopted by the Court in its ruling.”
The justices granted writs of certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins on June 30, consolidating the cases prior to hearing oral arguments once the next term of the Supreme Court begins in October. The high court’s decision to accept the petition came less than a week after it struck down Hawaii’s so-called “vampire rule” regarding carrying firearms on private property in a 6-3 ruling authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
The New York Times noted in a May 13 article that, not only was the AR-15 a very popular rifle, but that modern semiautomatic firearms bearing a superficial resemblance to the AK-47 were previously “ubiquitous” before the AR-15’s ascendance among the general public. Under the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and Bruen, firearms in common use for lawful purposes fall under the Second Amendment’s protection.
“Assault weapons bans represent one of the largest and most pernicious gun rights issues facing Americans,” SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said in a Friday release announcing the brief had been filed. “The Second Amendment demands that it is ‘the People’ who get to choose what firearm is best suited to their lawful needs, not an ideologue legislator.”
“Modern semi-automatic rifles are the overwhelming choice of Americans for all sorts of reasons – they are easy to shoot, mechanically accurate, modular and ergonomically adaptable,” Kraut continued. “As a result, Americans from all walks of life choose these firearms to defend their families and their homes. Our brief today lays out exactly why politicians who hide behind their own armed security do not have the authority to ban these firearms.”
Weeks after the Supreme Court took up the Viramontes case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling declaring New Jersey’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” and so-called “large-capacity magazines” holding more than 10 rounds violated the Second Amendment rights of residents.
“Applying the framework announced in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, we agree with the District Court that New Jersey’s ban on Colt AR-15s violates the Second Amendment,” the Third Circuit said in its opinion — written by Circuit Judge Arianna Freeman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden — in Cheeseman v. New Jersey Attorney General. “However, because the record supports the same result for all semi-automatic rifles—not only Colt AR-15s—we will MODIFY the District Court’s order so that it deems the Assault Firearm Provisions unconstitutional with respect to the full class of semi-automatic rifles. We will AFFIRM that part of the order as modified.”
“The [large-capacity magazine] Provisions also violate the Second Amendment, so we will REVERSE the District Court’s order with respect to those,” the Third Circuit continued, creating a “circuit split” due to its ruling conflicting with appellate circuits that upheld similar bans.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
