esquire.com – WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was a big day for guns Monday on both sides of First Street, under the steadily melting trees and atop the steadily liquefying sidewalks. In the afternoon and evening, the U.S. Senate was going to take up debate on four bills that would partially control this country’s reckless love for its firearms. This promised to be quite a show, if not an entirely productive one, since it was not likely that any of the four bills would pass.

But, in the morning, the Supreme Court—still killing penalties one skater down—took up a narrower version of the question. Ruling on the case of Shew v. Malloy, the Court refused to hear a case that would have struck down a Connecticut law banning the sale and possession of a large assortment of semiautomatic rifles and large-capacity magazines. (The Court also let stand a similar law in New York.) The Connecticut law had been passed in the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.