On the nation’s 250th anniversary weekend, 26 mass shootings added to more than 7,200 since Mass Shooting Tracker began in 2013.
One brief just ended misuse of the National Guard. With your support, one brief can end misuse of the Second Amendment—before the Supreme Court makes America’s gun crisis worse.
The Urgent Moment
On June 30th, the Court took up Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, cases that will decide whether Chicago and Connecticut bans on AR-15s and other high-powered, assault rifles survive. If those bans fall, similar state and local protections will fall with them.
The next 30 days are decisive. To influence the outcome, American Enlightenment Project must be funded now so it can prepare and file a consequential amicus brief this October 28th.
Why This Matters
American Enlightenment Project is focused on the source of the problem: Dist. of Columbia v. Heller—the 2008 decision that gave Americans a constitutional right to have a gun, and set the stage for today’s crisis and gun control futility.
An Epidemic, then Crisis—and Silence about the Cause
This crisis cannot be explained by mental health, poverty, youth, or crime alone. Those factors existed before Heller and are found in other nations with a fraction of our gun violence.
Nor do they explain the surge in guns and gun deaths after the Court in 2010 expanded Heller nationwide to allow handguns in every home, resulting in a declared “gun epidemic” by 2015. Or the spike in school shootings, flat for decades—whose post-2010 rise could not be more graphic.
Dissenting Justice Stevens called Heller the Court’s “worst self-inflicted wound,” warning it’s “profoundly important” Americans understand Heller’s role in the “slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns,” and that it “desperately needs to be overturned.”
Yet few Americans know Heller—or all the guesswork behind it.
By 2024, after the Court expanded Heller again to allow handguns in public, the epidemic had become a “public health crisis” that has “exploded in recent years—from mass shootings at concerts and supermarkets to school fights settled with a bullet” (KFF Health, 3.6.24). Few ask what caused it to explode. Or whether Heller has a role.
That silence is no accident. Other organizations won’t talk about Heller—or about the nearly unbroken line of losses for gun control in the Court since, including two more this June.
Fatalism about Another Major Setback
Also unknown to most Americans, as they grapple with relentless violence and wait for answers that never come, is how close the Court now stands to allowing AR-15s—with a ballistic impact described as “sickening and unacceptable”—on every street corner: outside every school, church, restaurant, bar, office, and government building.
Scholars Jacob Charles of Pepperdine Law and Dru Stevenson of South Texas Law called the Court’s acceptance of two AR-15 cases “a bad sign” and “kind of depressing.” They’ve already begun projecting what states could do “to mitigate the damage”—which is not much.
One Brief Can Change Everything
The Court blocked National Guard deployments after a single brief showed “regular forces” in a militia statute meant military forces, not law enforcement, as both sides superficially argued.
That is our approach. American Enlightenment Project has spent years preparing to end misuse of the Second Amendment—and gun-control futility—through a similar amicus brief to correct both sides’ superficial arguments in Heller and persuade the Court to overturn it.
Fraught AR-15 issues are stretching Heller to the breaking point. Justice Barrett has questioned whether it “was rightly decided,” shown independence from the conservative supermajority, and criticized the tendency to substitute historical conjecture for law that produced it.
Heller only needs a push. Or, better, a devastating blow.
Why Philanthropy Is Essential—Now
This is the moment for ordinary donors to do something exceptional: fund the legal cure before this national health crisis becomes worse—much worse.
If you believe the country needs a better approach to gun violence, this is the moment to act.
If you can open doors, open them now. If you can fund this work, fund it now. Thank you.
American Enlightenment Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Gifts are tax-deductible.