The Supreme Court begins a new term on Monday, and on its docket is the question gun owners have been waiting almost two decades to see answered.

Whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.

That is the whole question. The justices agreed to decide that and nothing else, which is unusual and tells you something about how they intend to handle it.

Two cases are consolidated. Viramontes v. Cook County challenges the ban in Cook County, Illinois, and Grant v. Higgins challenges a similar Connecticut law.

Oral argument is scheduled for December 2. A ruling would land by the end of the term next summer.

The Washington Times reported the AR-15 cases alongside immigration and religious liberty disputes on the early docket.

Here is why this case is different from the gun rulings that came before it.

Heller established an individual right to keep a handgun at home. McDonald applied that right against the states. Bruen set the test courts must use, requiring a law to fit the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

None of them answered the question that actually governs most modern gun laws. Which weapons the right covers.

That gap is why so-called assault weapons bans have survived. Lower courts read Bruen and reached opposite conclusions about whether a rifle owned by millions of Americans counts as the kind of arm the Constitution protects.

This is the first case in years to take up the types of weapons directly. Whatever the Court says will decide far more than two statutes.

Roughly nine states and the District of Columbia have bans of this kind on the books. A ruling for the challengers would put every one of them in immediate jeopardy, and a ruling the other way would secure them for a generation.

The administration is not sitting this one out. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Court for ten minutes of argument time to oppose the bans, which puts the federal government on the side of the gun owners against the states.

The religious liberty side of the docket is busy too. St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy asks whether Colorado can exclude Catholic preschools from its universal preschool program over religious policies that conflict with state anti-discrimination rules.

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network told Fox News there is no single thread running through the term.

“There’s a couple of religious freedom cases. We have a couple cases that touch on state and federal preemption, but I’m not sure there’s an easy theme for all of them,” she said.

No easy theme, maybe. But one case on that list decides whether the most popular rifle in America is protected by the Constitution, and that is a theme all by itself.