Courts

The Next Phase Of Bruen? SCOTUS Could Overturn Gun Safety Laws In All 50 States

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume Kavanaugh will be in favor of overturning the prohibiting laws.

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Man using rifleThe tension between the right to life, liberty, and the right to bear arms is reaching its boiling point. We’ve long known that Bruen was a soothsaying verdict for this Court’s (potentially non-existent) limits on the individual right to bear arms. In a short amount of time, the Court may pull the trigger on nixing each state’s capacity to limit the ownership of assault weapons. From Vox:

The Supreme Court could hand down a decision any day now in National Association for Gun Rights v. City of Naperville, a case that could legalize assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in all 50 states.

The case challenges a Naperville, Illinois, ordinance and a similar Illinois state law, both of which ban assault weapons, which the state law defines to include certain semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s and AK-47s. Additionally, the state law prohibits the sale of a “large capacity ammunition feeding device,” which the statute defines as long gun magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, or handgun magazines that hold more than 15 bullets.

The plaintiffs, which include a gun shop owner and a gun rights group, claim the two statutes violate the Second Amendment.

The plaintiffs may well be right. Not the Second Amendment of the Founders or the Second Amendment of DC v. Heller. This is the new renditi0n of the Second, ushered in by the NRA and our esteemed Court. The Bruen ruling really threw the meaning of the Second amendment in flux in absurd ways:

Understood in this way, the case before the Court is the natural next step.

Should the Supreme Court accept that argument and overturn these laws, it would have sweeping implications for the entire country. That decision would need to be followed throughout the entire nation — which would most likely mean that neither any state nor the US Congress could ban assault rifles or high-capacity magazines.

And there is good reason to fear that this Court could, at the very least, decide to make semiautomatic assault rifles legal throughout the United States. In 2011, a federal appeals court upheld the District of Columbia’s ban on assault weapons — over the dissent of an up-and-coming right-wing judge named Brett Kavanaugh.

Flash forward a dozen years, and Kavanaugh is now the median justice on a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. So if he still believes semiautomatic rifles aren’t particularly “dangerous and unusual,” he is well-positioned to turn the opinion he wrote in 2011 into law.

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Tl;dr: yeah, we’re fucked.

The Founders thought that the cost of liberty was eternal vigilance. We now know what they meant by that. The toll is not cheap — we pay for liberty with increased mortality from road rage and dead children.

The good news? Look, I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Maybe the economic need to prevent the regular event of our children being shot and killed will be answered by the market? There are plethora of bullet-resistant commodities aimed at children in 4th grade brushing up on their addition.

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To Liberty.

A New Supreme Court Case Seeks To Legalize Assault Weapons In All 50 States [Vox]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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