Category: Cowardice O’ The Day

Chief Justice Roberts Is Not Defending The Second Amendment—He Is Containing It

New York – Let us dispense with the pleasantries.

The United States Supreme Court’s handling of Second Amendment cases is not “confusing,” not “complicated,” and not the product of innocent happenstance. It is, rather, the predictable output of discretionary power being used to avoid decisive confrontation with state defiance of the Court’s own landmark rulings.

And in that avoidance, the Second Amendment is being bled—slowly, methodically, and with a degree of institutional self-protection that should alarm every citizen who understands what the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms is, and what it is for.

This companion article is necessarily short. The full argument is set forth in our original Arbalest Quarrel article, (Chief Justice Roberts Is Strangling The Life Out Of The Second Amendment) which we urge you to read in full. But the essentials are plain enough, and they must be stated plainly.

The Battle Is Not Only In The Merits—It Is In The Docket

Most Americans do not understand that the Supreme Court is not a forum of automatic justice.

The Court selects what it will hear. It grants or denies petitions for writs of certiorari at its discretion. And although Supreme Court Rule 10 pretends to supply a neutral architecture for that discretion, the reality is that Rule 10 functions as a judicial escape hatch—a convenient justification for declining the very cases that demand intervention.

In no domain is this more destructive than in Second Amendment litigation.

If the Court refuses to take the cases that matter, then Heller, McDonald, and Bruen become museum pieces—praised as “historic” while states openly devise end-runs around them in real time.

A Right that cannot be enforced is not a Right in any serious sense. It is a slogan.

The “Rule Of Four” Is Real—But The Strategy Is Realer

We discuss at length in the original article the Supreme Court’s so-called “Rule of Four”—the traditional practice that four Justices may grant certiorari.

This is not a trivial procedural detail. It is supposed to preserve the integrity of the Court’s appellate function by ensuring that a substantial minority may bring a matter before the Court for decision on the merits.

But in Second Amendment cases, the deeper reality is this:

Those Justices who cherish the Natural Law Right codified in the Second Amendment do not, as a general matter, vote to grant review unless they believe they have the votes to win.

And those who detest the Right will happily grant review when they believe they have five votes to shred it.

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Supreme Court’s Failure: Path to Tyranny ~ & Why Armed Americans Must Care

The recent inaction by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the people’s right to keep and bear arms isn’t just disappointing—it invites tyranny. When the Court refuses to protect a right so explicitly anchored in the Constitution, it risks turning once‑free people into subjects. And as the founding generation understood, tyranny compels rebellion.

Background: What This Means For You

If you’re new to this issue: the Second Amendment guarantees a natural, individual right of self‑defense. Landmark cases like District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) confirmed that Americans have the right to own functional firearms, especially handguns, for lawful purposes in their homes.

Two years later McDonald v. Chicago made clear that this right applies at the state level as well.

Since then, lower courts have been left to navigate whether gun regulations are allowed under an “in‑common‑use” and historical tradition approach, not interest balancing. Yet, gun‑rights advocates have seen many victories blocked, and equally many restrictions upheld under vague standards.

The Court’s Recent Defeat: Antonyuk and Beyond

In its latest term, the Court chose not to review Antonyuk vs. James, a critical Second Amendment case from New York’s courts. That means the lower court’s decision—and the State’s restrictive Concealed Carry Improvement Act—remains in place.

Despite calls from Justices Thomas and Alito for clarity, the Court laid down no reasoning. That silence undermines not just precedent, but the credibility of the constitutional right itself.

Without Court guidance, states pushing severe carry limits and licensing regimes can continue to chip away at our right to armed self‑defense—state power overriding individual liberty, even where founding principles say otherwise.

Why This Matters to Armed Americans

Our in-depth article over at Arbalest, “The Failure Of The U.S. Supreme Court To Ensure The Sanctity Of The RKBA”, spells it out: the failure of the Court to act is not neutrality—it is bowing to tyranny. Masked under slogans like “strong gun laws reduce violence,” the real outcome is disarming law‑abiding citizens, while leaving government unchecked.

A citizenry that cannot defend itself is at the mercy of government power. If free people allow erosion of the right to bear arms, they lose the final safeguard against arbitrary state authority. The author warns: this is not philosophical—they mean actual disarmament, or worse.

Last Words

The failure of the high Court has weakened the natural law right. Its refusal to grant certiorari in key Second Amendment cases refuses to protect the sanctity of those rights. It allows anti‑gun states to continue trampling self‑defense protections under the guise of regulation. This is not legal evolution—it’s legal surrender.

If you’re ready to dig into the full arguments, precise citations, and rhetorical power of the original, I encourage you to visit our article and read it in full. It lays out, step‑by‑step, how judicial inaction signals tyranny—and why now is the time for armed citizens to pay attention.

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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