Judges Confused by Supreme Court’s Historical Test for Gun Laws
Confusion over the US Supreme Court’s last gun rights ruling is likely to persist even after the justices decide a new Second Amendment case next term.
Establishing a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public in a landmark 2022 decision forced lower courts to play historian and look to Colonial-era laws to justify the lawfulness of gun restrictions, a duty that has frustrated some judges.
“Judges are not historians,” Judge Carlton Reeves of the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi said in dismissing a case after finding no history or tradition to support upholding the federal ban on convicted felons having guns. “We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history.”……………….
This is rank, ripe, stinking BS.
1, It’s from Bloomberg, so should a posteriori be suspect.
2, They’re not confused. They’re not stupid. They’re subversives.
If a federal judge is incapable of looking up and analyzing legal and legislative history, they shouldn’t have a job. As an appellate judge, it is literally a core part of their responsibilities, and a big part of why our tax dollars pay for them to have clerks.
3,“We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history as an excuse? Judges do history all of the time. Even worse, Bruen doesn’t ask them to be historians of the 18th century in general. It only asks them to research historical laws.
One of the experts the article quoted admitted this is hard because most gun laws are from the twentieth century. That isn’t so much an attack on the Text/History/Tradition test as it is a condemnation of the last century’s purposeful rejection of a constitutional standard.
4, Historical revisionism is at the core of the modern gun control movement. It’s why Biden repeats the lie about people not being able to buy cannons and why news organizations wring their hands about how judges having to understand history is an unprecedented attack on our legal system.
5, The end goal is to make the following the only publicly acceptable opinion to hold:
a, There is no such thing as a right to own firearms
b, The very idea that there could be such a thing was created by NRA lobbyists and far-right conspiracists in the 70’s.
This is the gun control ‘Big Lie’.