On Thursday, the Supreme Court, in its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, struck down a New York law. It is a decision that is broad and reckless, tnycloseread writes, and will rattle efforts to arrive at a national consensus on guns.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the decision is the test that Thomas lays out for deciding if a gun law is constitutional. He discards a two-step test that has come into use in appeals courts in the years since Heller: look first at how a restriction fits in the history of gun laws, and then at balancing factors, such as a compelling public interest or a conflict with other rights. But a two-step test, Thomas wrote, “is one step too many.
What’s strange about Thomas’s fixation on history is how much of it he discards. In truth, laws regulating guns, and specifically the carrying of guns in public, date back centuries, to the English common law. As a result, Thomas fills page after page of the decision with increasingly strained rationalizations for why, as Breyer observes in his dissent, some laws “are too old. But others are too recent. Still others did not last long enough. Some applied to too few people.
The ideological proclivities of the conservative Justices—who also, this week, weakened defendants’ Miranda rights—were on display in the concurrences that three of them wrote.protests that the decision isn’t really such a big deal, since only six states have concealed-carry-licensing laws like New York’s. As is often the case with Kavanaugh, this is disingenuous.
Why, Alito asks, “does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years?” And “What is the relevance of statistics about the use of guns to commit suicide?” And why all the “statistics on children and adolescents killed by guns”—what could Breyer think they have to do with this case? Alito takes his concurrence to a singularly desolate place: Breyer, he writes, “appears not to understand” why Americans carry guns for self-defense; his answer,...
Breyer notes that different states face different challenges. In this case, though, the Second Amendment is being used to prevent them “from working out solutions to these problems through democratic processes.” The image of political discourse in Alito’s concurrence, and in more and more of this Court’s rulings, involves a lot of shouting, expressions of bitterness, and—rhetorically, at least—gun waving. It’s the picture of a constitutional tragedy.
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