NYPD tells Supreme Court that legal assault weapons would leave officers 'outgunned' in NYC

The NYPD is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to keep assault weapons bans in place, warning that legalizing the rifles would leave New York City officers "outgunned and underprotected." The department's friend-of-the-court brief, filed Oct. 28 by the city's Law Department, was reported by amNewYork on Tuesday.

The brief supports the governments defending two consolidated cases, Viramontes v. Cook County (Illinois) and Grant v. Higgins (Connecticut), in which gun owners and gun-rights groups argue that bans on AR-15-style and other semiautomatic rifles violate the Second Amendment. The court is scheduled to hear arguments on Dec. 2, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul's office.

What the NYPD argues

• Long-standing policy: New York City has banned assault weapons since 1991, a policy the NYPD supported then and still does, the brief says. Both the state and the city ban them today.
• Officer safety: Most officers carry a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, and standard NYPD vests stop handgun rounds but not rifle bullets, according to the brief. It cites research finding that shootings with assault weapons left on average 2.3 times as many people dead and 22.7 times as many wounded as other shootings.
• An arms race: If people can legally carry such rifles, the NYPD "may have to similarly arm some significant portion of its officer ranks," the brief says, which would change policing "for the worse" because a rifle cannot be holstered and makes less-lethal options harder to use.
• History: The brief recalls that the department moved from .38-caliber revolvers to 9 mm pistols in the 1990s after officers felt "increasingly outgunned," and points to the July 2025 Midtown office shooting in which a gunman with an assault weapon killed four people, including Officer Didarul Islam.

The NYPD also says officers respond to thousands of gun-related calls each year and that openly carried rifles would put them in "a terrible bind" between respecting gun owners' rights and protecting the public.

New York's other briefs

On the same day, Hochul joined 10 other governors in a separate brief urging the court to uphold state and local assault weapons limits. Her office warned that a ruling against the bans "could invalidate lifesaving laws across the country." New York State and New York City both ban assault weapons, the NYPD brief notes.

The NYPD's brief also pushes back on police departments elsewhere that filed on the other side of the case, amNY reported.