Bruen Drops and It’s a Win

We The People Constitution

This doesn’t portend a return to blogging. Social media and Google have killed blogging as a thing, so I’m not inclined to return to the same level of activity I once had. But I wanted to note Bruen because it’s probably the most important thing to happen to gun rights since McDonald dropped 12 years ago. You can read the ruling here. At this point I have done only a quick skim, but my impression is that it is about as good a ruling as we could have hoped for. Is it ironclad? No. No ruling would be. My impression is that Kavanaugh and Roberts are the weaker of the Bruen majority, but they still joined the majority of the opinion and filed their own concurrence basically saying shall-issue was fine.

Overall it puts the kibosh on the lower courts Second Amendment Two-Step dance. They will have to come up with a more novel means of resisting the Second Amendment, and I suspect they will. But it will get harder for them. The Court pretty clearly wanted to emphasize Heller and signal to the lower court that it is not dead letter. The Court made quite clear that outlying laws were meaningless for 2nd Amendment analysis. So the fact that the Sullivan Law is over 100 years old by now doesn’t mean it’s constitutional because it has a long history: it is an outlier that new other jurisdictions have passed.

Long term it’s probably best not to rely on the Courts for protection. Just ask Planned Parenthood how well that’s working out for them. But we can use these reprieves to help repair the gun culture in these jurisdictions if the restrictions lighten things up a little. This is not over. There will never be a death blow to the desire of the nobility to control the serfs. Nonetheless we should use the circumstances presented to us for maximal advantage.