LKB is a lawyer who, IIRC, argues cases at the federal level. He’s also a member of the SCotUS bar, that means he and other SCotUS bar members get preferential seating during court oral arguments, and he has reported back what his in-person impressions were during those arguments.

If he comments on gun cases, you can pretty much take what he says to the proverbial bank…

Contrary to your statement that “The overwhelming majority of appeals to SCOTUS are rejected without making it to a conference,” the truth is that virtually *ALL* cert petitions “go to conference” at some point. But just because they “go to conference” doesn’t mean the Court will actually discuss them — the vast number of them are just on a list that’s essentially, “OK, these are the cases that have been fully briefed. Nobody has indicated interest in taking them up, so they’ll be on the “cert denied” order list that comes out of the conference. Speak now or hold your peace.”

What’s uncommon, and a potential indication of a potential cert grant, is if a cert petition is “re-listed’; i.e., it went to conference but is then “re-listed” for discussion at a later conference . . . which is an indication that at least one Justice is interested. (Remember, it takes the votes of four Justices to grant cert, and typically they don’t want to vote to grant cert unless you’re pretty sure their side will prevail — that’s why we saw so many post-MacDonald cases that should have been taken being denied: the court was in a classic Mexican Standoff, with four pro-2A votes, four anti-2A votes, and the unpredictable Anthony Kennedy in the middle. Neither side wanted to take a case that they could well lose and thus significantly alter the existing legal landscape.)

I’m not seeing that any of these cases have been relisted. The fact that a lot of them were referred to conference at the same time may well indicate some interest in them, but from the dockets I’m not seeing anything remarkable. Recall too that just because a case goes to conference doesn’t mean the court can’t simply “hold” it — which they typically do if there’s a pending cert grant that might provide a rule of decision for that case.

My guess is that all of these will be held pending the Rahimi decision, with a good chance that many will just be GVR’d (cert GRANTED, judgment VACATED, case REMANDED for reconsideration in light of Rahimi).