The Supreme Court's new term begins with its traditional first Monday in October start, Oct. 5, 2026, and the preview coverage that ran over the weekend pointed at the same subject: guns. NPR, the Richmond-based station WIS-TV and Yahoo News all published term curtain-raisers on Oct. 2 and Oct. 3 flagging Second Amendment cases alongside voting rights, climate and immigration disputes.
That matters because of where the Court has been. Writing in 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas described the Court's record as a decade-long failure to protect the Second Amendment, with petitions turned away and appeals courts left to sort out the splits. The past year looks different. The justices decided a Hawaii concealed-carry case and a case involving a marijuana user's gun rights, and SCOTUSblog ran a roundup in July under the heading "The court's big gun cases."
One caution up front. A Fox News term preview circulating this week is reported to quote a legal expert characterizing the Court's posture on gun cases. We were unable to read that article directly and cannot confirm the expert, the wording or the context, so we are not publishing the characterization here. The same headline appeared on Yahoo, which may indicate syndication rather than a second, independent account.
What the Court actually did this year
Strip away the framing and look at the decisions. Roughly three months ago, Fox News reported that the Court ruled against Hawaii in a concealed-carry gun rights case. Separately, and roughly five months before that ruling, Fox News reported that the justices heard argument on a Hawaii gun law requiring the consent of a property owner before a firearm may be carried there. The notes available to us do not establish that those are the same matter, and we are not treating them as one. Fox News also reported that the Court sided with a marijuana user in a gun case.
Those are narrow holdings, not sweeping ones, and they cut in a direction gun owners generally like. What they do not do is settle the biggest open question in Second Amendment law — whether states may ban the most commonly owned rifles in the country. One of the two Yahoo previews put AR-15s in its headline; the other referred more generally to climate change and guns. Which specific cases the Fox News piece cited, we could not confirm.
Why the long silence still shapes the term
The backdrop is a complaint the justices made about themselves. In June 2020, after the Court declined to hear a batch of gun petitions, Thomas wrote a dissent from the denial of certiorari, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, describing what he called a "decade-long failure to protect the Second Amendment."
"But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens' Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way." — Justice Clarence Thomas, 2020 dissent, as reported by Fox News
That dissent is six years old, and the Court that produced it has changed. But the condition Thomas identified — circuit courts splitting, with no referee — is the sort of thing that produces a crowded gun docket later. Cases do not vanish when the Supreme Court declines them. They pile up.
The coverage is not telling one story
The term preview is being written two very different ways. Fox News presents a Court leaning into the Second Amendment. Yahoo, about three months ago, ran a piece headlined "The Supreme Court's embarrassing new Second Amendment decision, explained." The record that both are describing is the same: the Court has been willing to take gun cases again and has ruled for gun owners in at least two of them, while so far declining to resolve the broadest questions.
From here, the argument sessions, order lists and opinions will run on the Court's own calendar. The primary sources are the docket entries and the orders, not the previews. We will be reading those, and we will report what the Court says in its own words — including, if and when it can be confirmed, the full context of the characterization in the Fox News preview and who offered it.
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