Cook County Asks Supreme Court to Drop AR-15 Case After Lead Petitioner Quits

Cook County asked the Supreme Court on November 5, 2026 to dismiss Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, as moot or improvidently granted if lead petitioner Cutberto Viramontes is allowed to leave the case. The seven-page suggestion of mootness, signed by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, landed four weeks before the December 2 argument on whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.

Viramontes filed a two-page motion under Supreme Court Rule 46.2 on October 29 asking to be dismissed as a petitioner. Signed by David H. Thompson of Cooper & Kirk, it gave no reason and said no other petitioner was seeking dismissal, so the case remained pending as to the rest. The county reads the silence against him. It says the most natural inference from the bare motion is that his circumstances have changed in some significant fashion, and it asks the Court to require a declaration if the petitioners contend he still qualifies the two membership groups for standing.

The county’s argument turns on which rifle each remaining petitioner wants. Viramontes told the district court he sought to own a Smith & Wesson Military & Police AR-15 style rifle, which the county concedes gave him a concrete stake in the question presented. Christopher Khaya, the other individual petitioner, wants an IMI Galil, and the petitioners themselves told the district court that rifle is not an AR-15 style rifle but is largely based on the AK-47 design. The county says the record holds no facts showing the Galil operates like an AR-15 and none showing it is in common use, cites a collector listing that about 400 of one Galil model were imported in the 1980s, and notes Khaya said he would most likely use the rifle at the range. Both membership groups, the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, identified only two members in Cook County, Viramontes and Khaya, so the county says their standing falls with his.

The filing concedes in a footnote that the jurisdictional problem would not keep the Court from deciding the question presented, because Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, the challenge to Connecticut’s rifle ban, was consolidated with the Cook County case when the Court granted certiorari on June 30, 2026 and allotted one hour of argument for both.

The county’s own corrected merits brief, filed October 27, lists the firearms its ordinance names, the AK-47, AR-15, Bushmaster XM15, Bushmaster Carbon 15, Bushmaster MOE series, ArmaLite M15, Armalite M15-T and Olympic Arms PCR, and then defines the whole list as “AR-15 platform weapons” for the rest of the brief. Second Amendment lawyer Stephen Halbrook wrote in a November 8 post at Reason that the county used that term as a convenient shorthand for every rifle it bans, including AK-pattern rifles, and now asks the Court to treat the Galil as something else. Section 54-212(a) of the county code bars manufacturing, selling, acquiring, carrying or possessing an assault weapon, with exemptions for police, the armed forces and government employees. The district court granted the county summary judgment and the Seventh Circuit affirmed, and the respondents are the county, Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Sheriff Thomas Dart.

The Court had not acted on either filing as of the November 9 docket. On that day it granted the Solicitor General’s September 9 motion to take part in oral argument as a friend of the court with divided time, after the United States filed its own amicus brief on September 4. The petition was docketed August 29, 2025, and the case was set for argument on September 4, 2026.

Argument in the consolidated cases remains scheduled for Wednesday, December 2, 2026, with one hour allotted.