HARTFORD, Conn. >> Citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year, gun rights groups and firearms owners have launched another attempt to overturn Connecticut’s ban on certain semiautomatic rifles that was enacted in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

A new lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court by three gun owners, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League and the Second Amendment Foundation. They are seeking to overturn the state prohibition on what they call “modern sporting arms” such as AR-15-style rifles like the one used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators at the Newtown school in 2012.

“We all deserve to live in safe communities, but denying ownership of the most commonly owned firearms in the country is not the way to achieve it,” Holly Sullivan, president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, said in a statement.

“The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision ... has opened the door to this challenge, and we believe Connecticut will be hard pressed to prove its statutes are constitutional,” she said.

State officials vowed to defend the 2013 gun laws.

“Connecticut’s gun laws save lives, and we are not going back,” state Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “We will not allow weapons of war back into our schools, our houses of worship, our grocery stores, and our communities.”

In June, the Supreme Court broadly expanded gun rights in a 6-3 ruling by the conservative majority that overturned a New York law restricting carrying guns in public and affected a half-dozen other states with similar laws. After the ruling, New York and other states have moved to pass new gun restrictions that comply with the decision.

Gun rights groups had attempted to overturn Connecticut’s ban on assault weapons before. But in 2016, the high court, with fewer conservative justices, rejected challenges to assault weapons bans in Connecticut in New York passed in response to the Sandy Hook shooting.