Two More 2A Cases Make Their Supreme Court Conference Debut Tomorrow Today

Earlier today I covered why one Supreme Court-watcher is optimistic about the justices taking up bans on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines next term, but those aren’t the only 2A issues that will be discussed in tomorrow’s conference. There are two cases making their first appearance in the justice’s closed door meeting that could be granted cert (or denied) as early as next Monday, and both are worth taking up… and talking about.

The first case is U.S. v. Peterson; a challenge to the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on suppressors. Specifically, the attorneys for plaintiff George Peterson are asking SCOTUS to address two questions: First, whether the National Firearms Act’s taxation-and-registration scheme for covered firearms can be justified as a licensing law, and whether the National Firearms Act’s taxation-and-registration scheme violates the Second Amendment with respect to firearm suppressors.

The Trump administration waived its right to reply to the cert petition, and it’s not a great sign for the plaintiffs that not a single justice asked the DOJ to reply anyway. To date, though, Trump’s DOJ has argued that, while suppressors may be protected “arms” under the Second Amendment, the $200 tax (which has now been zeroed out by the One Beautiful Bill Act) and registration requirement (which is still in place) represent “modest” burdens on our right to keep and bear arms.

The plaintiffs have made strong arguments about why that is not the case, but they weren’t able to prevail in the fairly conservative and 2A-friendly Fifth Circuit, which treated the taxation-and-registration scheme as akin to a shall-issue-licensing law. I’ll be thrilled if I’m wrong, but my hunch is that the justices aren’t ready to wade into the thorny questions posed by the plaintiffs here. If SCOTUS grants cert to a case dealing with bans on “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines the odds of a cert grant in Peterson would improve, but I can’t see SCOTUS addressing the constitutionality of the NFA and its treatment of suppressors before it takes up gun and magazine bans… at least not with an outcome that gun owners will appreciate.

The other Second Amendment case making its first Friday appearance in conference is Gardner v. Maryland, which poses three questions to the Court:

1. Does Maryland’s prohibition on carrying a handgun without a state permit, as applied to an interstate traveler with a valid Virginia concealed carry permit who displayed a loaded firearm in self-defense against an assailant’s vehicular assault and physical advance, violate the Second Amendment under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen… by lacking a historical tradition of disarming law-abiding citizens in such circumstances?

2. Did the Maryland courts’ reliance on a video showing the assailant’s calm demeanor upon police arrival, without his testimony or other witnesses to corroborate the incident, while disregarding Petitioner’s evidence of the assailant’s PIT maneuver, vehicular coercion, and physical advance, violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by denying Petitioner a meaningful opportunity to present a self-defense claim?

3. Does Maryland’s refusal to recognize Petitioner’s valid Virginia concealed carry permit for interstate travel violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause, U.S. Const, art. IV, § 1, or the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (18 U.S.C. § 926A), despite the firearm being loaded and Pennsylvania’s non-recognition of the permit at the time of the incident?

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Bearing arms: Shifting views among gun owners on a foundational right

Reporter Patrik Jonsson has been writing about guns for 15 years. As the Monitor’s beat reporter in the American Southeast, Patrik has covered gun violence and gun rights; coffee shops banning firearms and stand-your-ground-law advocates using them; mass shootings and the National Rifle Association, and whether the gun itself has become a “sacred object” in America.

In this week’s magazine, he writes about a new twist in what has become one of this country’s most emotional, and debated, issues: a growing liberal embrace not just of guns themselves, but of an approach to the Second Amendment long associated with the conservative right.

“I’ve covered so many angles on the Second Amendment,” Patrik told me. “I’ve done stories about liberal gun owners, I did a story about women gun owners, I did a story about the complications of being a Black gun owner.” But Patrik started noticing something new after the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse fatally shot by federal agents in Minnesota earlier this year.

Why We Wrote This

The Monitor’s longtime Georgia bureau chief, Patrik Jonsson, noticed a shift in thought among gun owners: a mistrust of government on the political left.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, Patrik explains, a growing number and diversity of Americans started turning to firearms in hopes of defending themselves from criminals. This, according to scholars, was an expansion of what is sometimes called “Gun Culture 2.0” – a perception of guns as being primarily for self-protection rather than for hunting or military use.

(Previously, those on the left were more likely to identify with gun control advocates, who point to research showing that firearms in the home increase the risk of violence there.)

After Minnesota, though, Patrik found a growing, cross-partisan belief that guns are necessary not just to protect oneself from criminals, but also from the government.

Mr. Pretti had been carrying a licensed handgun – a fact used by some government officials to at first justify his shooting and later raised by citizens across the political spectrum worried about federal overreach.

“What happened after Alex Pretti … was this simmering sense on the left that, ‘Maybe the folks on the right were correct? What if the state falls into the wrong hands?’” Patrik told me.

“if the state falls into the wrong hands” he says

Judge Alex Kozinski –
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

He started to look for data, he says, and found early indications that thought might be shifting.

“This is at the heart of the story – this rethinking of the Second Amendment on the left and what that means,” Patrik says.

It’s not just a threat to America

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Wednesday delivered a televised broadside against progressivism, a political philosophy he described as an existential threat to America and the principles that founded it 250 years ago.

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said in a speech at the University of Texas Austin Law School pegged to the nation’s upcoming milestone birthday. 

A spirit of “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” toward America — by Americans — has taken hold, Thomas said in remarks carried live on CSPAN.

Thomas, the Supreme Court’s senior conservative member, spoke broadly, not referencing specific contemporary events or political figures to make his case. But his comments come at a critical time for the sharply divided country and the Court.

He said that the values enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence have “fallen out of favor” among Americans — a trend perpetrated, he argued, by “intellectuals” and the nation’s colleges and universities.

“intellectuals” he says…
George Orwell –
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them

Thomas also said he believes many people no longer believe “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by a limited government.

 “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

The 77-year-old justice was appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and is one of the longest-serving justices in history. He is a staunch conservative and has been a reliable vote in favor of the Trump administration’s positions in cases.

Thomas said Washington has been overrun by elected and appointed officials who lack commitment to “righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.”

“They recast themselves as Institutionalists, pragmatists or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences, and their country,” he said.

Thomas called on Americans to stand up for their principles and endure personal “sacrifices,” if necessary, to preserve the nation’s democracy.

“In my view, we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration have so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs,” he said.

1775-

Joseph Warren sends Paul Revere to Lexington with a message for John Hancock and Samuel Adams, warning them that General Gage was planning to send troops to Concord. On his ride back to Boston, Revere stops in Charlestown, where he arranges with church sexton Robert Newman and vestryman John Pulling to have lanterns hanged in the steeple of the North Church to signal whether troops were moving by land (one lantern) or by sea (two lanterns).

Following Revere’s first ride to Lexington, patriots in Worcester, Massachusetts, relocate military supplies hidden in their town.

In a way, the continuing gun control controversy is much like the prohibition problem in Oklahoma in the fifties and sixties. It was the belief of many that prohibitionists and bootleggers were united in their efforts to prevent the legal sale of alcoholic beverages. In gun control, those who can afford private alarm systems and bodyguards are united with criminals in their desire to keep guns out of the hands of honest citizens.
— Bill Dannenmaier

BLUF
…bad facts drive bad policy. The issue here is not whether crime near schools is serious. The issue is whether the public is being told the truth. On that question, the answer is clear. The methodology does not support the headline, and the headline does not deserve the public’s trust.

‘31 Shootings a Day’ Media Narrative Collapses Under Easy Scrutiny

A recent news headline declared, “11,500 shootings occurred within 500 yards of US schools last year.” The obvious implication is that American school children are under daily fire on school campuses nationwide. But, as with most gun control narratives in national media written by reporters who mostly don’t understand the basics of firearms or criminal gun use, that narrative collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

The first glaring red flag in this story is that Hearst Television Data Visualization Journalist Susie Webb and the WCVB Get the Facts Data Team built their agenda-driven narrative by relying on gun control advocacy site The Trace’s “School-Adjacent Shootings” dataset, which tracks Gun Violence Archive (GVA) incidents that fell within 500 yards of a K-12 school. Even that dataset warns that each row is a shooting-to-school match and must be deduplicated before anyone totals up the incidents, deaths or injuries. However, that was not done before Webb and WVTM’s story went live on several news outlets, on social media, on Hearst Television’s YouTube channel and was even—unsurprisingly—picked up by MSN.

This blatant error is not a trivial methodological footnote. It is the difference between measuring school-related crime and measuring a broad circle on a map. It’s also a trick that’s been seen time and again from the likes of Everytown’s propagandist at The Trace and GVA.

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DOJ Reverses Course on Defending Biden’s ‘Engaged in the Business’ Rule for Gun Sales

Gun Owners of America is celebrating a win in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals after the Department of Justice abruptly reversed course in a lawsuit challenging the ATF’s expanded definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms that was put into effect under the Biden administration and then-ATF Director Steve Dettelbach.

The rule was explicitly designed to get as close as possible to “universal” background checks without a new law being passed by Congress, and treated the vast majority of private, person-to-person sales as those that should be conducted by a federally licensed firearms dealer. The attorneys general of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah, along with GOA, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, and Tennessee Firearms Association filed a lawsuit to block the law from being enforced, and a district court granted a preliminary injunction barring enforcement against the plaintiffs in June, 2024.

Biden’s DOJ appealed that decision, though, and the Trump administration continued to defend the rule even as officials said that virtually every one of Biden’s executive actions on firearms were in the process of being undone.

On Thursday, however, the DOJ filed a request with the Fifth Circuit to voluntarily dismiss its appeal with the plaintiffs’ consent. In their request, the DOJ’s attorneys said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives “plans to revisit” the rule and “revis[e] the guidelines for determining who is considered ‘engaged in the business’ of selling firearms.”

The DOJ also informed the court (and the rest ofus) that a notice of proposed rulemaking addressing the “engaged in the business rule” is “forthcoming”, and that in light of the proposed rule on the horizon the government “has determined that it is not appropriate to continue this appeal.”

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Kentucky Legislature Overrides Governor’s Vetoes on Two Pro-Second Amendment Bills

Key Takeaways

  • Kentucky General Assembly overrode Governor Beshear’s vetoes on two pro-Second Amendment bills, restoring liability protections and enabling concealed carry for adults aged 18-20.
  • House Bill 78, the PLCAA Clarification Act, protects the firearms industry from civil lawsuits linked to criminal misuse of their products.
  • House Bill 312 allows provisional concealed carry licenses for adults between 18 and 20, who can later apply for standard licenses.
  • Supporters argue that the veto overrides affirm constitutional rights and combat unjust age discrimination in carrying firearms.
  • The legislation signals to anti-rights advocates the need to stop blaming the firearms industry for crimes.

FRANKFORT, KY — The Kentucky General Assembly voted to override Governor Andy Beshear’s vetoes of two pro-Second Amendment bills this week, restoring liability protections for the firearms industry and opening a path for law-abiding adults between the ages of 18 and 20 to carry concealed.

The two bills — House Bill 78 and House Bill 312 — had each passed with wide legislative support before the Democratic governor sent them back. Kentucky lawmakers returned to Frankfort and voted to override both.

HB 78: Protecting the Firearms Industry from Frivolous Lawsuits

House Bill 78, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms (PLCAA) Clarification Act of 2026, establishes legal protections for firearm and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, and retailers against civil lawsuits arising from the criminal or unlawful misuse of their products. The bill builds on protections already provided by the federal PLCAA, which some courts have failed to apply as Congress intended.

Kentucky’s House of Representatives voted 80 to 19 to override the veto. The Senate voted 31 to 6.

State-level PLCAA measures have become increasingly necessary. A number of antigun states have enacted laws designed to circumvent the federal PLCAA and allow the very sort of frivolous lawsuits the federal law bars. The NSSF has described this coordinated effort as a wave of lawfare aimed at financially crippling the firearms industry.

NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence G. Keane addressed the governor’s reasoning directly. “Governor Beshear acknowledged when he vetoed this bill that this legislation would prevent frivolous and harassing lawsuits for violence committed by criminals,” Keane said. He added that Beshear chose to side with gun control special interest groups that want to use the courts to accomplish what they cannot accomplish through legislation.

Keane put the issue plainly. “Members of the firearm industry are no more responsible for the actions of criminals than Kentucky’s bourbon distillers are responsible for drunk driving deaths,” he said.

HB 312: Concealed Carry Licenses for Adults Ages 18 to 20

House Bill 312 authorizes the Kentucky State Police to issue provisional concealed carry licenses to adults between the ages of 18 and 20. Those who receive a provisional license can later apply for a standard license through their county sheriff or through the KSP online system. The bill passed both chambers before Gov. Beshear vetoed it.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said the governor was practicing age discrimination by denying full rights of citizenship to young adults who can serve in the military, start businesses, get married, and run for office.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) had called on the legislature to act after the veto. “We are both delighted and proud of the Kentucky legislators who returned to Frankfort for these important votes,” Gottlieb said.

What This Means

Gottlieb said the Kentucky override should be seen as a signal to anti-rights advocates to stop blaming an entire lawful industry for the country’s violent crime problem and to stop restricting the rights of an entire age class.

The Second Amendment is a fundamental civil right. It does not begin at age 21, and it does not end because a criminal misused a product. Kentucky’s legislature affirmed both of those principles this week. The firearms industry can do business without being punished for crimes it did not commit, and law-abiding young adults in Kentucky can now pursue their right to carry for personal protection.

Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax kills wife and then himself, police say

Virginia’s former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife and himself inside their home overnight, according to local police.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said at a news conference Thursday morning that their teenage children were at the house in Annandale, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., when the shootings occurred.

“Former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife inside of their home and then shot and killed himself,” Davis said, adding that their older son called 911 just after midnight.

Davis described the incident as the result of a “domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce.”

Police are in the preliminary stage of the investigation, but Davis said that Fairfax was recently served paperwork indicating when he was scheduled to next appear in court for the ongoing divorce proceedings.

The former lieutenant governor, who was 47, served in the role from 2018 to 2022 under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.

In 2019, two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault years earlier, prompting Virginia Democrats to call for his resignation. Meredith Watson claimed Fairfax raped her in 2000 while they were students at Duke University. Vanessa Tyson accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex in 2004 when they attended the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Fairfax denied the accusations, saying the encounters with the women were consensual. He said he would remain in office and called for an FBI investigation into the claims.

When he ran in the Democratic primary for governor in 2021, Fairfax, who was Black, said during the gubernatorial debate he was treated like George Floyd and Emmett Till when Democrats immediately called for his resignation after the women made the allegations.