{"id":12242,"date":"2023-11-22T18:16:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-22T18:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=12242"},"modified":"2023-11-22T18:16:08","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T18:16:08","slug":"the-supreme-court-confronts-its-own-failure-in-an-appalling-case-about-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=12242","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court confronts its own failure in an appalling case about guns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“The core question in Rahimi<\/em>, in other words, is whether the Court will back away from its decision in Bruen<\/em>, which has led to all kinds of disastrous results, including the Fifth Circuit\u2019s decision holding that abusive husbands have a right to keep a weapon they could use to murder their wives.”
…
“Bruen <\/em>held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, \u201cthe government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation\u2019s historical tradition of firearm regulation<\/a>.\u201d This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that \u201canalogous regulations\u201d also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed \u2014 particularly if the law addresses \u201ca general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.\u201d If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This places an extraordinarily high burden on any lawyer defending a gun law. When the historical record is ambiguous or indeterminate<\/a>, the government loses, and a gun law is effectively repealed by the courts. And lawyers defending gun laws face an especially heavy burden when they defend laws that seek to address a problem, like domestic abuse, that has existed for centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost immediately, the Bruen<\/em> decision sparked mass confusion in the federal courts<\/a>. Judges have reached contradictory results<\/a> in a multitude of post-Bruen<\/em> challenges to gun laws. Courts applying Bruen<\/em> have struck laws prohibiting guns in places of worship<\/a>, requiring guns to have serial numbers<\/a> that allow them to be tracked by law enforcement, and prohibiting underage ownership of guns<\/a> \u2014 all claiming that these laws are inconsistent with \u201chistorical tradition.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On the day Bruen<\/em> was decided, Justice Stephen Breyer<\/a> warned in a dissenting opinion that, by requiring judges to dive into often-vague and indeterminate historical records, Bruen<\/em> \u201cimposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish<\/a>.\u201d \u201cCourts are, after all, staffed by lawyers, not historians,\u201d Breyer continued. And \u201clegal experts typically have little experience answering contested historical questions or applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One fundamental problem with Bruen<\/em>, as Judge Miller\u2019s critique of the decision emphasizes, is that the six Republican-appointed justices who joined it appear to have no understanding of why changes in American society over the past 250 years make it difficult or impossible to draw meaningful analogies between modern gun laws and those that existed when the Constitution was written.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/scotus\/2023\/10\/24\/23914235\/supreme-court-domestic-violence-abusers-gun-policy-us-rahimi<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The core question in Rahimi, in other words, is whether the Court will back away from its decision in Bruen, which has led to all kinds of disastrous results, including the Fifth Circuit\u2019s decision holding that abusive husbands have a right to keep a weapon they could use to murder their wives.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, \u201cthe government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation\u2019s historical tradition of firearm regulation.\u201d This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that \u201canalogous regulations\u201d also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed \u2014 particularly if the law addresses \u201ca general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.\u201d If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.
\nThis places an extraordinarily high burden on any lawyer defending a gun law. When the historical record is ambiguous or indeterminate, the government loses, and a gun law is effectively repealed by the courts. And lawyers defending gun laws face an especially heavy burden when they defend laws that seek to address a problem, like domestic abuse, that has existed for centuries.<\/p>\n

Almost immediately, the Bruen decision sparked mass confusion in the federal courts. Judges have reached contradictory results in a multitude of post-Bruen challenges to gun laws. Courts applying Bruen have struck laws prohibiting guns in places of worship, requiring guns to have serial numbers that allow them to be tracked by law enforcement, and prohibiting underage ownership of guns \u2014 all claiming that these laws are inconsistent with \u201chistorical tradition.\u201d”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“On the day Bruen was decided, Justice Stephen Breyer warned in a dissenting opinion that, by requiring judges to dive into often-vague and indeterminate historical records, Bruen \u201cimposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.\u201d \u201cCourts are, after all, staffed by lawyers, not historians,\u201d Breyer continued. And \u201clegal experts typically have little experience answering contested historical questions or applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems.\u201d”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“One fundamental problem with Bruen, as Judge Miller\u2019s critique of the decision emphasizes, is that the six Republican-appointed justices who joined it appear to have no understanding of why changes in American society over the past 250 years make it difficult or impossible to draw meaningful analogies between modern gun laws and those that existed when the Constitution was written.”<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/scotus\/2023\/10\/24\/23914235\/supreme-court-domestic-violence-abusers-gun-policy-us-rahimi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[429,790,113,407,112,406,109,1213,528],"class_list":["post-12242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-constitution","tag-courts","tag-gun-control","tag-gun-deaths","tag-gun-laws","tag-gun-violence","tag-guns","tag-judiciary","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12243,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242\/revisions\/12243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}