POLITICS 06/26/2017 02:00 pm ET

Supreme Court Declines To Hear 2 Gun Rights Cases

And people on both sides of the gun issue are likely to be unhappy.

In a pair of decisions that appeared to frustrate justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down two Second Amendment cases.

The higher-profile of the cases, Peruta v. California, involved a challenge to a California law that bans the open carrying of firearms and requires concealed carry applicants to first demonstrate good cause. Petitioners had argued that law enforcement officials in San Diego and Yolo counties had defined good cause so narrowly that they only gave licenses to individuals who could, for example, present “documented threats of violence” or “demonstrate they are a specific target at risk.”

By refusing to hear the case, the justices left in place a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the California restrictions and declared that the Second Amendment did not protect the right to carry a concealed weapon outside of the home.

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The second case, Sessions v. Binderup, centered around a federal law banning convicted felons from owning guns. Daniel Binderup and Julio Suarez ― two Pennsylvania men who had been barred from possessing firearms due to convictions for nonviolent misdemeanors more than 20 years ago ― challenged the measure, claiming it denied Second Amendment rights to people convicted only of minor offenses.

Federal law generally prohibits gun ownership for any person convicted of a “crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year,” excluding “any State offense classified by the laws of the State as a misdemeanor and punishable by a term of imprisonment of two years or less.”

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