Three fronts are moving at once on gun rights right now: Congress and the courts handing down real wins, states passing new restrictions that immediately land in litigation, and a quieter fight over financial plumbing that never mentions the word "gun." Here's where each one actually stands, sourced to the primary documents.

Start with Congress. The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act (H.R. 38), sponsored by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), would let anyone with a valid carry permit — or anyone from a constitutional-carry state — carry concealed across state lines under the visited state's rules. It cleared the House Judiciary Committee 18-9 in March 2025 (Congress.gov). Alongside it, Rep. Tom Emmer's Firearm Due Process Protection Act (H.R. 2184) gives people wrongly denied a gun purchase by a background-check error an actual legal path to fix it, and moved out of committee by voice vote (NSSF).

The courts have moved further and faster. In Wolford v. Lopez (June 25, 2026), the Supreme Court struck down Hawaii's default rule that private property open to the public was off-limits to armed carry unless the owner explicitly said otherwise — a 6-3 ruling that flips the default to "carry allowed unless posted" (SCOTUSblog). In United States v. Hemani (June 18, 2026), the Court ruled 9-0 to limit federal prosecutions of gun owners under the law barring drug users from possessing firearms, finding the government had overreached the Second Amendment in some applications (CNBC). And on June 30, 2026, the Court agreed to hear Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, consolidated to decide whether AR-15-platform rifles — the most common rifle type in the country — are protected "arms in common use." Argument is expected this fall (SCOTUSblog).

On the regulatory side, the DOJ dismissed its own appeal in Mock v. Bondi on July 17, 2025, formally killing the 2023 ATF pistol brace rule nationwide — a rule that had effectively turned brace-equipped pistols into unregistered short-barreled rifles overnight for millions of owners (The Reload). Forced reset triggers, banned under the same enforcement posture, are now federally legal following a 2025 DOJ settlement, though several states still restrict them separately. And in May 2026, the DOJ went on offense, suing Colorado directly over its statewide ban on magazines over 15 rounds — the federal government actively litigating against a state gun law, not just declining to defend one.

The state picture is a different story, and it's moving fast in the other direction in several statehouses. Rhode Island's Assault Weapons Ban Act of 2025 takes effect July 1, 2026. Virginia's new ban on assault firearms and large-capacity magazines takes effect the same day — though multiple Virginia commonwealth's attorneys have already said they won't enforce it, and four separate lawsuits are challenging it before it even starts. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed H.4885, expanding the state's "assault-style" weapon definition and restricting large-capacity feeding devices. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and D.C. already had comprehensive bans on the books (summary via USCCA).

The good news, if you're on the receiving end of these laws, is that courts keep striking pieces of them down. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in Benson v. United States (March 5, 2026) that D.C.'s 10-round magazine cap violates the Second Amendment outright. The Third Circuit struck down New Jersey's ban on both certain semiautomatic rifles and large-capacity magazines in a case brought by the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs. Waiting periods are similarly split: the Tenth Circuit struck down New Mexico's seven-day waiting period in 2025 as likely unconstitutional, while the First Circuit let Maine's 72-hour waiting period stand pending trial (Bloomberg Law). Not every circuit agrees — the Seventh Circuit went the other way in July 2026, upholding Illinois's ban on AR-15-style rifles and 30-round magazines 2-1 in Barnett v. Raoul, reversing a lower court that had blocked it.

Translation: there is no settled national answer right now. The law you live under depends entirely on which circuit you're standing in, and the Supreme Court's Viramontes/Grant argument this fall is very likely the case that finally forces a single national rule on rifle bans specifically.

This is the part that doesn't show up in a floor vote. When new gun laws stall or lose in court, the fight has increasingly moved to financial infrastructure — a lever no legislature has to approve.

The mechanism: in 2022, the International Organization for Standardization approved MCC 5723, a new merchant category code that flags a business specifically as a firearms retailer to every card network and bank that processes its transactions. California, New York, and Colorado now require its use; New York's comptroller and city pension trustees have publicly pushed for full implementation as a way to let banks flag "suspicious" purchase patterns at gun stores specifically (NYC Comptroller). At least seven Republican-led states have banned the code outright, and Congress passed its own answer: the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act (H.R. 1181), which bars card networks from requiring the firearms-specific code at all and would preempt the state laws requiring it. The House passed it 221-201 in July 2026; it's now stalled in the Senate (Congress.gov).

Parallel to that: gun retailers have been quietly losing access to basic banking and payment processing. A Maryland gun shop, United Gun Shop, sued Capital One and Melio Payments in 2026 after its payment processing was abruptly shut off in March 2026 with Capital One citing "restricted industry" status — the shop says it cost roughly $75,000 in damages (Bearing Arms). The administration's response came a year earlier: an August 7, 2025 executive order, "Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans," directly cites the Obama-era Operation Choke Point as precedent and orders federal banking regulators to strip "reputational risk" language from their exam guidance — language regulators had used to pressure banks into dropping "high-risk" but entirely legal customers, including firearms dealers (The White House, Federal Register).

On the advocacy side, Everytown Law and Giffords Law Center have taken the litigation-first approach explicitly public, launching a joint tracker of gun-industry lawsuits and currently serving as counsel in active suits against Glock, Smith & Wesson, Sturm Ruger, and Daniel Defense — not over any specific law broken, but under product-liability and public-nuisance theories aimed at the manufacturers directly (Everytown Law). It's a strategy that doesn't require winning a single vote in a single legislature — just enough lawsuits, in enough courts, to make the underlying business unworkable.

Put all three pieces together and the shape is clear: the legislative and judicial fights over the Second Amendment are close to even right now, genuinely contested in Congress and split badly across the circuits. The financial and litigation pressure campaign is a separate track altogether, aimed at the industry's plumbing rather than the law itself — and it's the one track where a single MCC code or a single dropped bank account can do what several failed statehouse votes couldn't.