BLUF
The patience of the Second Amendment community is wearing thin, and this reply captures it very well. We have been given the runaround for too long. Justice has been denied through delay. Judicial processes have been manipulated to serve only one end: the affirmation of unconstitutional infringements.
It’s time for those games to come to a crashing end and for our Rights to be restored.
Dear SCOTUS: Percolation Tests Are For Septic Tanks, Not Second Amendment Infringements
When faced with a problem, politicians have a tendency to not actually find the root cause of that problem and come with effective solutions to solve that problem. Their primary motivation is to appear like they’re solving the problem in order to ensure their chances of reelection.
When looked at from this lens, “assault weapon” bans, and indeed the majority of gun control laws, make perfect sense. When crooks and crazies do bad things, the easiest and laziest thing that a politician can do is to demonize those who did not commit those evil deeds and don’t have a mean bone in their bodies to ever commit such evil deeds in their lifetimes. But it’s easy for politicians to say, “Look, your serf, if only you gave up your rights can we all be at peace.”
“Assault weapon” bans are a crystallization of this logic. Most readers of this website are well aware, but for the tiny minority who aren’t, an “assault weapon” is nothing more than an arbitrarily created category of arms. They are not functionally different from other arms. Banning them serves two purposes: 1) allow the politician to look good, and 2) set the legal stage, intentionally or not, for the ban of more arms by reclassifying them as “assault weapons.”
Second-Amendment organizations have been challenging these bans for a long time. Their lawsuits have been moving at a glacial pace, getting bounced around like a ping-pong ball from court to court. In 2022, the bans got their day in Court, when two bans – Miller v. Bonta (California), and Bianchi v. Frosch (Maryland) – were effectively overturned by the Supreme Court and sent back to lower courts for reconsideration.
But the Supreme Court underestimated the intransigence and dishonesty of the lower courts. After a couple of years worth of judicial games, lower courts have rubber-stamped “assault weapon” bans, and one of those cases – Snope v. Brown (a reincarnated version of Bianchi v. Frosch), is knocking on the Supreme Court’s door again.
Maryland, of course, wants the Supreme Court to not hear this case. One of their pretexts is “percolation”:
Whether assault weapons are covered by the text of the Second Amendment following Bruen, and whether a ban on such weapons is supported by this Nation’s historical tradition, are questions that have only begun to percolate in the courts of appeals.
Jurisdictions in at least eight circuits have some form of ban on the possession of assault weapons. Yet to date, only two courts of appeals—the Fourth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit—have considered Bruen’s application to assault weapons bans. And the Seventh Circuit has done so only in reviewing decisions whether to grant preliminary injunctive relief.
There is no reason why this Court should stray from its usual practice of allowing questions to percolate in multiple courts of appeals, with arguments tested and refined in cases litigated through final judgment on the merits, before granting certiorari.
