Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
One thing the court refused to realize is that the founding fathers of 1791 didn’t consider advancements in modern weaponry when writing the Constitution is because those advanced weapons didn’t fucking exist. People generally don’t write laws about things that don’t exist. Go back in time and put an AR 15 in the hands of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and see if they still believe that that weapon should be in the hands of ordinary citizens.
It would be like trying to use the Constitution as a basis to see how we should handle the immigration rights of space aliens from Jupiter.
And I never did understand why we have to rely on the practices of the 18th century to make rulings about 21st century society. Even the founding fathers knew that the Constitution would have to change over time as society advanced. In fact, they themselves did it 10 times. It’s what amendments are for.
This is a false trope that always gets brought out in the gun control arguments.
There were actually magazine-fed repeating rifles in the era of the founding of the USA. In 1779 the Girandoni air rifle was produced, which was carried by Lewis & Clark on their expedition across the frontier. It was a repeating rifle that could fire at least 19 times and was as powerful as a 9mm handgun cartridge from modern times, but more accurate up to 300 yards.
There was also the Puckle gun (machine gun) and the Gatling gun is pretty old too.
So to claim that the authors of the Constitution had “no idea” about how advanced guns could get is obviously false.
It could fire 19 times you say… Well then, let’s pass out the heavy firearms!