Category: Cowardice O’ The Day

Well, at least we’re finally getting a firm idea of exactly where a majority of this court stands on the 2nd amendment’s restriction on goobermint powers when it comes to those nasty icky guns.

US Supreme Court rebuffs challenge to Washington, DC’s high-capacity gun magazine ban

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Friday to hear a challenge to the legality of a restriction imposed by Washington, D.C., on large-capacity ammunition magazines in a case that gives the justices a chance to further expand gun rights.

The justices turned away the challengers’ appeal of a lower court’s ruling that upheld the Democratic-governed city’s ban on virtually all ammunition-feeding devices holding more than 10 rounds. The lower court rejected arguments that the measure violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

The four men who challenged the law had asked the Supreme Court to consider whether the Second Amendment allows a categorical ban on arms that are commonly used throughout the United States for generally lawful purposes such as self-defense. The challengers all hold concealed-carry pistol licenses for the District of Columbia and regularly carry a pistol there.

The Supreme Court has dramatically expanded the Second Amendment in recent decades, including in a landmark 2008 ruling that struck down a strict gun control law in Washington and declared that individuals have a right to own guns for such lawful purposes as self-defense in the home.

In 2022, powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, the court made it harder to defend gun restrictions under the Second Amendment, requiring that such limits be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The District of Columbia’s government makes it illegal to possess or sell any ammunition-feeding device that holds more than 10 rounds, with only a narrow exception. The city’s lawyers in court papers wrote that it has restricted the capacity of gun magazines “in some form for close to a century.”

Washington-based U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in 2023 ruled in favor of the city, finding that large-capacity magazines are not “typically possessed for self-defense,” citing evidence showing that around two shots on average are fired in self-defense situations. The judge also found the city was likely to prevail in the case because it had demonstrated that its law is consistent with firearms regulation grounded in the “historical tradition” of the United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a 2-1 decision upheld the judge’s ruling in October 2024, prompting the challengers to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on June 2 declined to hear a similar challenge to Rhode Island’s ban on large-capacity magazines, as well as a challenge to a ban in Maryland on powerful semiautomatic rifles such as AR-15s, after lower courts upheld these restrictions.

The court on March 26 upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns.” In two rulings last year, it upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns but rejected a federal rule banning “bump stocks” – devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

Friday’s action by the court was unexpected. The court had planned to release it on Monday along with its other regularly scheduled orders, but a software glitch on Friday prematurely sent email notifications concerning the court’s decision in the case.

“As a result, the court is issuing that order list now,” said court spokesperson Patricia McCabe.

It is not the first time the court has inadvertently disclosed action in sensitive cases. Last year, an apparent draft of a ruling in a case involving emergency abortion access in Idaho was briefly uploaded to the court’s website before being taken down. That disclosure represented an embarrassment for the top U.S. judicial body, coming two years after the draft of a blockbuster ruling rolling back abortion rights was leaked.

Justice Kavanaugh to Second Amendment: We’re Really Busy Now, Come Back In A Year Or Two

On December 1, 2020, the Maryland ban on AR-15s was challenged. The plaintiffs lost in the District Court and before the Fourth Circuit. In August 2024, a cert petition was filed in Snope v. Brown. The petition sat in purgatory for nearly a year with fourteen relists.

Today, the Supreme Court finally put the petition out of its misery and denied cert. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have granted. Justice Barrett, as usual said nothing. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a very unusual statement respecting the denial of the petition. The first two paragraphs explain why the Maryland decision was “questionable.” If you read these parts, you would expect a grant. Indeed, Kavanaugh as circuit judge had found that the District of Columbia’s ban on AR-15s was unconstitutional. But then, we get to the last paragraph:

In short, under this Court’s precedents, the Fourth Circuit’s decision is questionable. Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review.

The AR–15 issue was recently decided by the First Circuit and is currently being considered by several other Courts of Appeals…..

Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decision making on the AR–15 issue.

 Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.

My mouth nearly hit the floor when I read this. Kavanaugh all-but signals that he will be a fourth vote to grant cert. He does not identify any vehicle problems, or reasons why the Maryland petition should not be granted. Does he really think that rulings from the Ninth Circuit will help much in the deliberations? These courts will all rule against the Second Amendment. Nothing is in doubt. The upshot is that the Court is really busy with other stuff right now, and you all should just come back later. The Second Amendment could take a sabbatical for a year or two until the docket lightens up. Indeed, this case has been pending for nearly four years. Maryland gun owners will just have to chill.

Of late I’ve been praiseworthy of some of Kavanaugh’s actions, but this is the sort of Kavanaugh opinion that infuriates me. And where is Justice Barrett on these issues? A decade ago in 2015, Justice Scalia dissented from denial of cert in Friedman v. Highland Park, a challenge to an assault weapon ban.

This issue isn’t new. I think this term will be remembered as the term in which Justice Barrett’s slide became indisputable. I started tracking it years ago, but it is hard to ignore now.

Kostas Moros

May as well do a proper thread on this. Read for my analysis/cope.
Snope denied. The Supreme Court has forsaken us.
Kavanaugh says they want more percolation, apparently.
First up is Kavanaugh, in a statement respecting the denial of cert. (Basically a concurrence in denying it) Not that it will matter until SCOTUS actually polices the antigun circuits, but Kavanaugh confirms we are right that: a. there is a “common use” test. Antigun states have denied this, arguing there is no such test, or if there is, it’s only “commonly used for self-defense.” b. it is historically-based (i.e., not part of the phony “plain text” analysis). Antigun states have argued it’s at the plain text step.
Not strong enough to get granted cert now though, I guess?
Sure, but the antigun circuits will absolutely take this as an affirmance of the terrible Fourth Circuit ruling. SCOTUS needs to accept that it must actively police those circuits, or just admit it has no interest in protecting the Second Amendment so we stop wasting our time.
While they didn’t join this statement, this is Barrett and Roberts speaking too, it’s pretty clear. Kavanaugh wouldn’t write with such confidence (i.e. “presumably”) if he didn’t think they – or at least one of them – was on board to hear such a case soon. You are free to think I am coping – I can’t blame you for having zero confidence in the Court after this. It’s just how I read it. Even if I am correct, that wouldn’t make it okay. Another year or two of denied rights is incredibly damaging. As I have pointed out before, our lives are not that long, and not having our Second Amendment right fully realized for another year or two is a real loss. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from percolation. Only antigun circuits ever here AWB cases, and their rulings are all very similar to each other.
We love you Justice Thomas, thanks for always being a real one.
I don’t like Justice Thomas embracing the plain text “step.” I guess I now have to concede there is such a step, bummer.
That said, the plain text is not hard to meet in an arms ban case, as Thomas points out.
Now that Thomas has confirmed I was wrong and there is a “plain text” step, I now urge the Supreme Court to gut it and make Bruen the one-step test it should be. Antigun circuits will always place “too high a burden” on Plaintiffs to avoid the historical analysis. The plain text step, if it is too exist, should be no more than a simple qualifier, not some rigorous analysis.
to* exist.
So while Thomas does reject my view that there is no meaningful plain text step, he does agree that it isn’t a hard step to meet.
Beautifully written. Too bad it is in a dissent from denial of cert, and not the first line of a per curiam ruling.
Thomas deals with the 4th Circuits dumb slippery slope argument.
Thomas agrees that percolation has no value.
He concludes by pointing out the Court’s logic in VanDerStok could allow for the federal government to declare AR-15s to be “machineguns” and ban them. A future Dem administration will no doubt try this.
So, what’s my speculation?
I think there was clearly a lot of negotiating behind the scenes, and Roberts/Barrett or one of them just doesn’t want another controversial issue on their plate right now.
They promised Kavanaugh they’d take up the issue soon, but who knows if they will keep that promise (no doubt the stream of Trump admin cases will continue for the whole four years). Hopefully the USDOJ will support the Duncan cert petition to add some pressure for a grant. If they deny Duncan, then the next best candidate is probably the Illinois cases about to be heard on final judgment by the Seventh Circuit.
It is interesting that Kavanaugh had no similar statement for Ocean State Tactical. As a judge on the DC Circuit, he dissented from an opinion (Heller II) upholding an AWB, but said as to magazines he would have remanded for further proceedings. It’s possible Kavanaugh is against AWBs, but would be accepting of a magazine capacity limit. I certainly hope that isn’t the case. I can’t blame anyone for dooming at this point, but we’ll keep doing the best we can. We need Justices Thomas and Alito replaced by fire-breathers like VanDyke who don’t care about suffocating decorum traditions and will openly call out their colleagues when they are being hacks. Thomas and Alito are the best justices on the Court, but they are aging and it is critical they be replaced with equally-strong but younger judges.
Finally, the percolation excuse must be especially frustrating for the Snope plaintiffs. Let’s say in a best case scenario, Kavanaugh is being truthful, and SCOTUS does grant a similar case and strikes down AWBs. The Snope plaintiffs are still out all of their legal fees, which do not get reimbursed if you are vindicated two years later. You only win back fees if your case wins. So they are just SOL.
Very cool SCOTUS, thanks.

Just to make it clear, ever since 1570 when the Regent of Scotland, James Stewart Earl of Moray, was assassinated by a man using a rifle, those in political power have been scared to death of the idea that the mere lowly peasantry could possess the very thing to simply take care of a government they saw as not ruling in their best interest, and one decide to do just that.

This Supreme Court Is Woefully Weak On The Second Amendment

When firearms are involved, originalism is ignored and basic principles of statutory interpretation are overlooked.

The Supreme Court just issued a decision allowing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to rewrite the nation’s gun laws. It appears that the seven justices have contracted a bad case of “Gun Derangement Syndrome,” or GDS — a serious infection that afflicts many on the federal bench.

The symptoms are this: when firearms are involved, the judicial rulebook goes out the window. Originalism is ignored, basic principles of statutory interpretation overlooked, and new rules of law invented. What’s left is nothing that passes for reasoned decision-making; it’s the implementation of judges’ personal policy predilections.

Until recently, the Supreme Court seemed immune to this illness. After nearly all federal circuits mused that the Second Amendment did not so much as protect an individual right to bear arms, District of Columbia v. Heller set the record straight. And after lower courts devised “judge-empowering interest-balancing tests” to circumvent Heller, The New York State Bar Association v. Bruen course-corrected.

But recently, cracks have begun to show. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in United States v. Rahimi, for example, arguably waters down Bruen’s rigorous requirement that governments must justify firearms laws with historical analogues — directing courts merely to follow the “principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition,” whatever that means. So wishy-washy was the Rahimi opinion that Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence to remind everyone that Bruen is still good law.

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Sixth Time the Charm for Snope at SCOTUS?

We can only hope. The Supreme Court has once again scheduled both Snope v. Brown and Ocean State Tactical v. Neronha for debate in conference this week, keeping hope alive that the justices will grant cert to one or both cases next week.

This Friday’s conference will be the sixth appearance for Snope (which is the challenge to Maryland’s ban on so-called assault weapons), while Ocean State Tactical (taking on Rhode Island’s ban on “large capacity” magazines) is up for its seventh go-round behind closed doors as the justice decide what cases they’ll accept. The good news is that neither of these cases were disposed of in today’s orders, but that still doesn’t mean that either or both are guaranteed to be heard by SCOTUS in the future.

I have to say that I’m still cautiously optimistic as well. Both Snope and Ocean State Tactical have been heard in conference since mid-December (December 4, in the case of Ocean State Tactical), which is more than enough time for Justice Thomas, Gorsuch, or Alito to write a dissent from denial of cert.

Of course, that’s also plenty of time for four justices to vote to hear one or both of these cases, and that doesn’t appear to have happened yet either.

We have no idea what’s being said during conference, or what’s causing the hold up, but there’s a slate of other Second Amendment cases that are heading the Court’s way, so the justices will have plenty of 2A topics to choose from in the near future.

A cert petition was filed in Antonyuk v. James (taking on New York’s post-Bruen carry laws) last month, and a reply is due from the New York AG this Wednesday, so that could be heard in conference in early March.

The Court has requested a response from the University of Michigan in Wade v. UofM, which challenges the university’s ban on concealed carry, and that response is due on March 10. That’s the same day that the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation must submit their response to the state of Minnesota in Jacobson v. Worth. The challenge to Minnesota’s ban on carrying for under-21s was successful at the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is intent on defending the ban til the bitter end.

The DOJ has a deadline of March 17 to reply to the cert petition in Perez-Garcia v. United States, which is an as-applied Second Amendment challenge to firearms-related pretrial release conditions. It’ll be interesting to see how AG Pam Bondi responds to the lawsuit and whether the Justice Department will defend the current law that allows for defendants to be prohibited from possessing a firearm before they’re convicted of a crime.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have a March deadline of their own in B&L Productions v. Newsom, which takes on the state’s prohibition on contracting for, authorizing, or allowing the sale of any firearm or ammunition on state-owned property. The law is designed to kill off the biggest gun shows in the state, and has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The state’s reply brief is due on March 20, about one week before the federal Justice Department’s deadline to reply in the last 2A-related case to come before the Court’s attention next month.

On March 28th the DOJ’s reply brief in Missouri v. United States is due before the justices. Missouri is seeking to defend the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which lower courts have thrown out a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The law was mean to block local and state law enforcement from cooperating with the feds in enforcing constitutionally suspect firearm statutes, but Missouri argues that the state has the power under the Tenth Amendment to decide which laws should be treated as null and void in the Show Me State.

As great as it would be for the Court to greenlight every one of these cases, that’s not likely to happen. Heck, at this point it’s an open question as to whether the justices will grant cert to any of these lawsuits. Fingers crossed that by this time next week we’re celebrating a grant in Snope and Ocean State Tactical instead of gritting our teeth in frustration.

Supreme Court Second Amendment Update 1-17-2025

In my last update, I wrote, “If a cert petition reaches its scheduled conference date without a justice requesting a response, then we know it was placed on the deadlist and never voted on. It was simply denied.” That remains true. Every Second Amendment cert petition that went into last Friday’s SCOTUS conference, where the respondents had either filed a waiver or did not file any response, was denied. In one case, the Feds asked for the cert petition to be granted, the lower court’s decision vacated, and the case remanded (GVR’d) back to the lower court for proceedings consistent with US v. Rahimi. With only one exception that I can recall when the Feds ask for a GVR, they get it.

I also wrote The “assault rifle” and “large capacity” magazine cert petitions were today relisted to this Friday’s SCOTUS conference of January 10th.” They survived that conference and were relisted to today’s conference. We won’t know until Tuesday whether they and the other petitions scheduled for today’s conference survived.

A response was requested for one of the petitions scheduled for today’s conference, but the Second Amendment was just one of three questions presented to the justices. I suspect that one of the other questions (most likely question 3) in Jarvis Parker, Petitioner v. Florida No. 24-6146 resulted in a response being requested.

In any event, when a justice requests a response after a waiver has been filed and the response hasn’t been filed before the petition goes to its scheduled conference, the petition survives that conference.

Last Friday’s SCOTUS conference resulted in 13 denials, 1 GVR, and two relists.

The petitions that were scheduled for today’s conference are:

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Federal Appeals Court Upholds Non-Violent Felon Gun Ban

The government can permanently disarm somebody convicted of non-violent felonies if their broader criminal history contains violent conduct, a federal appeals court has ruled.

On Monday, a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected a Kentucky defendant’s as-applied challenge to his recent conviction for possessing a firearm as a felon. The panel ruled that even if a person is convicted of non-violent felonies, the totality of their criminal record can indicate “dangerousness” that permits disarmament under the Second Amendment.

“Morton’s criminal record demonstrates dangerousness, specifically that he has committed ‘violent’ crimes ‘against the person,’” Judge Rachel Bloomekatz wrote in US v. Morton. “So, his conviction is consistent with the Second Amendment as interpreted in Williams. Accordingly, § 922(g)(1) is constitutional as applied to him.”

The ruling stands out as the first time the Sixth Circuit has applied its unique standard for adjudicating challenges to the federal felony gun ban—by far the most common Second Amendment claim arising in the courts since the Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision. Other circuits have either issued blanket rulings upholding the federal ban as constitutional or struck it down in narrow applications without setting a generalized standard for evaluating other cases. But the Sixth Circuit crafted a standard that only convicted felons who are shown to be “dangerous” can be disarmed in an August ruling upholding the ban.

Monday’s panel was tasked with applying that new “dangerousness” test to Jaylin Morton.

Morton was arrested in 2022 on several outstanding warrants and was found to be in possession of multiple handguns. At the time of his arrest, he already had “at least six prior felony convictions.” Those included multiple convictions for possessing a firearm as a felon, evading the police, one for burglary, and one for intimidating a participant in a legal process. He also had multiple non-felony assault convictions, including one for a domestic-violence incident in which he “punched his then-girlfriend in the head.”

He was subsequently indicted for possessing a firearm as a felon, which he moved to challenge on the grounds that the Second Amendment does not permit disarming him because his prior felony convictions were for non-violent crimes.

Drawing on the Sixth Circuit’s earlier ruling from August, US v. Williams, Judge Bloomekatz said that the court’s controlling precedent recognizes constitutional applications of the lifetime felony gun ban for offenses that “strongly suggest dangerousness,” particularly “crimes against the person,” like murder and assault. Bloomekatz said Morton’s criminal conduct “undoubtedly” demonstrates he is violent.

“Among other offenses, Morton was previously convicted for wanton endangerment and possessing a firearm as a felon after he shot at his ex-girlfriend and her family, and then showed up at her house a few weeks later and verbally harassed her with a gun on his person,” she wrote. “On another occasion, Morton was convicted of assault resulting from a domestic-violence incident after he punched his then-girlfriend in the head during an argument.”

And though the domestic violence incident was not a felony that currently underlies his lifetime firearms ban, she said the court “may look at Morton’s whole criminal history in assessing dangerousness.”

“Moreover, we are not confined to the fact of conviction alone, but may consider how an offense was committed,” she wrote. “Accordingly, Morton’s convictions demonstrate his dangerousness, making § 922(g)(1) constitutional as applied to him.”

The decision adds to the growing divergence in how lower courts are handling the federal lifetime gun ban for felons. Even courts that have reached similar conclusions to one another have done so under a variety of approaches, which has resulted in a variety of enforcement standards for the most commonly charged federal gun statute.

In June, Department of Justice expressed concern over the growing divide and asked the Supreme Court to resolve the matter.

“The substantial costs of prolonging uncertainty about the statute’s constitutionality outweigh any benefits of further percolation,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said at the time.

However, the Court opted to sidestep the matter. Instead, it remanded half a dozen requested cases back down to the appellate system to be reconsidered in light of its most recent case law.

Even as many of those cases have returned with unchanged outcomes, the Court has not yet taken up one that would resolve the question.

DOD ‘Intentionally Delayed’ National Guard Deployment To The Capitol On Jan. 6

Federal bureaucrats within the Department of Defense (DoD) delayed the deployment of the National Guard on Jan. 6, 2021 and covered it up, according to a House Republican investigation of government conduct related to the Capitol riot.

On Thursday, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is leading a review of the work completed by the partisan Jan. 6 probe run by then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, sent a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Defense demanding a correction to an agency report published in November 2021.

“This report was the final product of the DoD IG’s review into the events of January 6, and reviewed how the DoD responded to requests for support as the events unfolded,” Loudermilk, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the House Administration Committee, wrote. “Throughout the Subcommittee’s extensive investigation into the failures of January 6, 2021, we have discovered numerous flaws and inaccuracies in the report that your office has yet to appropriately address.”

Such flaws and inaccuracies, however, may have been part of a partisan cover-up after GOP lawmakers discovered the Pentagon was responsible for delays in guard deployment.

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Well, that didn’t take them long, did it?
And the Supreme Court again displays its cowardice concerning the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Second Circuit’s Second Opinion on NY Carry Laws Same As the First

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its second opinion in the multiple challenges to New York’s post-Bruen carry restrictions, but the court ended up making no changes to its initial ruling that was issued almost a year ago.

Instead of granting cert to Antonyuk v. James and hearing the appeal themselves, the justices on the Supreme Court granted cert but vacated the Second Circuit’s first ruling and remanded the case back to the appellate court after SCOTUS released its decision in Rahimi back in June. If the justices were hoping that Rahimi would guide the Second Circuit in a different direction they, like Second Amendment advocates, must be disappointed by today’s ruling.

Essentially, the only portions of New York’s post-Bruen laws the Second Circuit takes issue with are the requirement that concealed carry applicants disclose their social media accounts to licensing authorities and the state’s “vampire rule”, which prohibits concealed carry on all private property in the state unless signage specifically allowing concealed carry is conspicuously posted.

Virtually all of the other “sensitive places” defined by the deceptively named Concealed Carry Improvement Act were upheld by the Second Circuit on Thursday, including houses of worship, public parks and zoos, public transportation, establishments where alcohol is served, theaters, conferences, business centers, and “gatherings of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble.”

As Chuck Michel said, the entire decision is more than 200 pages long, so while you can read it in its entirety here, we’ll be focusing on just a couple of aspects of today’s decision in this post.

Just like the Second Circuit’s original ruling in Antonyuk, the panel makes a few staggering leaps of faith that aren’t supported by what the Supreme Court has said about the right to keep and bear arms. The Court has held, for instance, that modern gun control statutes must fit within the national tradition of gun ownership, and doubted “that just three colonial regulations could suffice” to prove a national tradition of restricting concealed carry to those that have demonstrated a justifiable need.

But the Second Circuit says that even if there are no “distinctly similar historical regulation[s]” to point to in defense of a current gun law, that may not matter.

Legislatures past and present have not generally legislated to their constitutional limits. Reasoning from historical silence is thus risky; it is not necessarily the case that, if no positive legislation from a particular time or place is in the record, it must be because the legislators then or there deemed such a regulation inconsistent with the right to bear arms.

No, but it definitely proves that those legislators didn’t create certain laws restricting the rights of lawful gun owners in response to concerns about violent crime or public safety, and that is telling… or at least it should be. The Supreme Court’s “text, history, and tradition” test is relatively straightforward, but it’s been squarely rejected by the Second Circuit in favor of a more “nuanced” approach that, conveniently enough, allowed the panel to conclude that even where there are no historical analogues in place, modern restrictions on the right to carry are permissible.

The Second Circuit also continues to place a lot of reliance on gun laws that were in place around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, not just 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. In theory, that makes some sense, given that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant in part to prevent states from intruding on those freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, many states, particularly in the former Confederacy, instituted laws that were designed to stop freedmen from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. In some case those laws were facially about depriving former slaves and freedmen from possessing or carrying a gun, but others were couched in racially-neutral terms but were enforced primarily or solely against groups.

The Second Circuit’s decision upholding most of New York’s newest restrictions on the right to carry relies largely on rewriting the Bruen test and an over-dependence on a handful of mid-19th century statutes. Again, even the absence of any historical analogues is no barrier for the Second Circuit, which is utterly ridiculous.

Antonyuk and the other related cases have yet to go to trial on the merits. So far, all of the legal wrangling has been about preliminary injunctions issued by the district courts, and the Second Circuit has now remanded these cases back to the lowest level of the federal judiciary to start the process all over again. Given the hostility the Second Circuit has historically displayed towards the Second Amendment (it originally upheld New York’s “may issue” law, for instance), today’s decision isn’t exactly surprising. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those New Yorkers who’ve seen their right to carry become even more limited in scope and practice in the two years since the Supreme Court declared that right is just as fundamentally important as the right to keep a gun in the home.

Supreme Court Orders Fresh Look at Young-Adult Gun Restrictions

The US Supreme Court sidestepped a brewing gun-safety issue for now, telling a federal appeals court to reconsider a ruling that 18-to-20-year-olds have a broad constitutional right to carry a firearm.
In a two-sentence order Tuesday, the justices opted not to take up an appeal by Pennsylvania officials, instead ordering a fresh look at the issue at the lower court level. The reconsideration order cited the high court’s ruling in June upholding a federal gun ban for people under domestic-violence orders.
Pennsylvania is one of 32 states, along with the federal government, that establish 21 as the minimum age for some gun rights. The case before the high court involved a Pennsylvania law that prohibits people age 18-to-20 from openly carrying firearms during a declared state of emergency.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the law, saying in a 2-1 decision the state hadn’t shown the type of historic pedigree required under an earlier Supreme Court ruling.
The law is being challenged by two gun-rights groups and three people who were under age 21 when the suit was filed in 2020. They urged the Supreme Court to reject Pennsylvania’s appeal without ordering reconsideration, saying lower courts are generally in agreement that states can’t put special restrictions on 18-to-20-year-olds.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry argued that the 3rd Circuit imposed a much stricter historical test for gun laws than the Supreme Court said in the domestic-violence case was required.
The Supreme Court has steered clear of new Second Amendment disputes since its June 21 ruling. Lower courts now are grappling with bans on so-called assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, laws prohibiting gun possession by convicted felons and restrictions on where firearms can be brought.
The Pennsylvania case is Paris v. Lara, 24-93.