The majority of our current Supreme Court justices worry that the Second Amendment does not get the respect it deserves. They claim modern gun control laws wrongly prioritize efforts to curb gun violence over the individual’s right to bear arms, impermissibly relegating that right to a “second-class” status. To ensure that legislatures and lower courts properly honor the Second Amendment, the high court last year announced a new test for the validity of laws regulating gun possession and carrying. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court declared that modern gun control laws must hew tightly to the Anglo-American tradition of firearms regulation as that tradition stood in and around 1791, the year the Second Amendment was ratified.
Invoking the litmus test laid down by Bruen, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently invalidated a federal law aimed at keeping guns from those adjudicated to be domestically abusive to their intimate partners. According to the appellate judges in U.S. v. Rahimi, this law is too unlike any laws from the late 18th century to survive constitutional review.
