Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
The clearest thing the founders ever said was - ‘ignore us.’ The constitution belongs to the living. If it does not serve a government by the people, for the people, it’s not worth the parchment it’s written on.
So if gun nuts think the second amendment is incompatible with any form of gun law, fuck the second amendment. We still need gun laws. If you think there’s an obstacle to that, we need to deal with that obstacle. We can fix it.
I am unmoved by what-ifs about bad-faith abuses of power. We’re already seeing the foundations of our democratic republic attacked by right-wing bastards. You can’t threaten that. It’s happening, right now. And they already pretend we want all guns banned. There’s nowhere for them to escalate to, when screeching about our plans. We might as well have big plans.
There’s no fucking downside to saying - fine. You want to make this 21st-century epidemic of stochastic terrorism all about one sentence in an 18th-century document? We can change that sentence. We can be like every other country on the planet, where access to point-and-click line-of-sight killing tools is at least as restricted as driving. Many of those countries still have guns! Some of them have guns all over the place, specifically for the sort of militia you pretend is decorative flavor text. But they don’t have mass shootings every fucking week, because they do the bare fucking minimum to train, educate, license, and check in on people who own these devices. These machines whose only function is to project lethal violence.