Governors from 11 blue states have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of bans on common semi-automatic rifles in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois.

On October 28, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul today joined 10 fellow Democrat governors in filing the brief in the consolidated cases Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, urging the Court to uphold state and local restrictions on so-called “assault weapons,” which are actually common arms owned by millions of lawful Americans and used for legal purposes.

“Combating gun violence is personal to me,” Hochul said in a news release announcing the brief. “Four years ago, I stood with neighbors in my hometown of Buffalo after a hate-fueled gunman used an assault weapon to terrorize innocent New Yorkers. It is unconscionable that our highest court would consider striking down a law designed to keep communities safe from this kind of horror.”

Hochul added: “Today, I am joining governors from across the country to remind the Supreme Court of the lives at stake if they choose to dismantle our assault weapons ban, and to fight for our right to protect against gun violence.”

Where Hochul’s argument falls short, of course, is the fact that such laws run afoul of the Second Amendment. Such firearms are unarguably in “common use,” and banning them is a direct infringement on the right to keep and bear arms.

In fact, the brief’s introduction belies the fact that the governors are relying on emotion and not constitutional law. It states: “In the wake of assault-weapon mass shootings, members of the Governors Safer Communities Initiative have stood with grieving families, exhausted first responders, and community members working to rebuild. The safety of our residents is our obligation, and it is at stake.”

The brief also argues that the Constitution has long recognized states’ authority to protect public health and safety, and that elected state leaders must retain the flexibility to enact policies tailored to their communities’ needs.

“In recognition of the unique harm posed by assault weapons, both states and the federal government have long imposed public safety measures that limit those particularly lethal weapons—frequently in direct response to mass-casualty shootings,” the brief argues. “Doing so is well within states’ longstanding constitutional prerogative to exercise their traditional police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of their residents.”

Also in the brief, the governors directly lied about the effect of the federal ban on so-called “assault weapons” and standard-capacity magazines.

“The federal government’s own experience is illustrative,” the brief argues. “During the decade that the federal law on assault weapons was in place, mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur than in the years before or after.”

In truth, a congressionally-mandated study of the federal ban concluded that “the banned guns were never used in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders” before the ban, and the ban’s 10-round limit on new magazines wasn’t a factor in multiple-victim or multiple-wound crimes. A follow-up study concluded that “AWs [assault weapons] and LCMs [large-capacity magazines] were used in only a minority of gun crimes prior to the 1994 federal ban,” “relatively few attacks involve more than 10 shots fired” and “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Oral arguments in the case are set to begin on December 2.