The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Expanding Second Amendment Gun Rights
The Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling in a New York gun rights case that will likely expand the scope of protections the Second Amendment affords individual gun owners who want to carry a gun outside of their residences. The biggest question in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen may not be whether a majority of justices strike down the state’s century-old handgun licensing requirement but how far that majority goes in signaling that other licensing measures created by government officials are now constitutionally suspect.
Can officials prohibit handguns in courtrooms and schools? What about college campuses or hospitals? When the Court heard oral argument in November, the six-member conservative majority seemed far more interested in exploring the contours of an expanded Second Amendment than in whether it ought to be expanded. This approach to gun regulation is a sea change from the Court’s historical approach to the amendment, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the arc of the Court’s jurisprudence in this area over the past 15 years.
The current Supreme Court is far more conservative and far more friendly to gun rights than the one that first recognized a personal right to bear arms under the Second Amendment in District Columbia v. Heller in 2008. Or the Supreme Court that acknowledged two years later in McDonald v. Chicago that such protections apply to state laws and regulations as well. Gone since then is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a foe of expanded gun rights. In her place is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose view of the Second Amendment is viewed by many as even more expansive than that of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller.
For many years after the Heller and McDonald decisions, Justice Clarence Thomas, an extreme gun rights supporter, urged his colleagues on the Court over and over again to accept more Second Amendment challenges to existing gun laws. He wanted the Supreme Court to use the newly recognized “personal” right under the Second Amendment to sweep away regulations restricting the possession and use of firearms. And for many years, until the arrival of the three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, Thomas’s colleagues rejected those attempts.
Read more: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-verge-expanding-second-amendment-gun-rights
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