(DCNF)—The Supreme Court will hear a case in December to determine the fate of bans on modern semiautomatic firearms with the justices likely spending the bulk of their time discussing how a handful of cases will apply to what is expected to be a landmark ruling.
The high court agreed on June 30 to hear Viramontes v. Cook County, a lawsuit challenging the ban imposed by a Chicago-area county. Which cases will the justices cite when deciding the fate of the bans on modern semi-automatic firearms that have passed in several states? These are the five likely contenders.
District of Columbia v. Heller
The court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes such as self-defense in the home, not just a collective militia right. It struck down D.C.’s handgun ban and its rule that lawfully owned guns had to be kept unloaded and disassembled or trigger-locked.
The 5–4 majority opinion, written by then-Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, said the Amendment’s “militia” language is prefatory and does not limit the operative right of “the people.” Scalia noted that the right of self-defense was a crucial component of the rights protected by the Second Amendment.
“[T]he Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms,” Scalia wrote.
The dissenters argued the amendment was mainly about military service and left room for broad civilian gun regulation.
McDonald v. City of Chicago
The court held that the Second Amendment right applied to state and local governments through the 14th Amendment. Chicago’s and Oak Park’s handgun bans therefore had to meet the same constitutional standard as the one enacted by the District of Columbia.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s controlling opinion relied mainly on due-process incorporation; Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said in a concurring opinion that he would have used the privileges or immunities clause instead. The 5–4 split tracked Heller (Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor replaced David Souter), with the dissenters warning that incorporation would sweep away a lot of state and city gun laws.
“[T]he Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States,” Alito wrote.
After the McDonald decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit would strike down Illinois’ ban on carrying concealed firearms, forcing the state to eventually pass a “shall issue” law regarding concealed carry permits.
Caetano v. Massachusetts
In a short unsigned opinion (called a “per curiam” opinion), the court vacated a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that stun guns were not protected by the Second Amendment. It reiterated that the right covered bearable arms even if they did not exist in 1791, and that the right applies to the states.
Thomas and Alito wrote separately to emphasize that a modern self-defense weapon cannot be banned just because it is new or uncommon in the military. The case was sent back, and Caetano was later found not guilty under the state stun-gun ban.
This case could play a key role in how the high court will decide Viramontes, since many supporters of bans on so-called “assault weapons” often claimed that the Founders had no concept of what modern firearms could do.
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen
The court struck down New York’s “proper cause” requirement for a license to carry a handgun in public. The justices ruled that law-abiding people with ordinary self-defense needs have a Second Amendment right to carry commonly used arms outside the home.
Thomas’s opinion rejected the two-step interest-balancing test many lower courts used after Heller and McDonald. Instead, a gun regulation survived only if it fits the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
“When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Thomas wrote. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Wolford v. Lopez
The court held that Hawaii may not make it a crime for licensed concealed-carry holders to bring handguns onto private property open to the public unless the owner gives express permission. That default ban, the majority said, hobbled the right to carry for self-defense in everyday life.
Alito wrote for a 6–3 majority that the law was inconsistent with text and history after Bruen. Alito took particular aim at the Hawaii Supreme Court for its assertion that the Second Amendment had to yield to the “Aloha spirit.”
“As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. 561 U. S., at 784–785. It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald),” Alito wrote. “It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%).”
The dissenters treated the statute more as a property-law default than as a gun ban and argued it left owners free to allow carry if they wanted.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Viramontes on Dec. 2, with the ruling expected to be released sometime in June 2027.
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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.
