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Notes -
Rahami dropped today.
It's about what I and @The_Nybbler expected, and worse a Roberts opinion at that. Roberts did "not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber", and lower courts will quite happily take his already-extensive 'analogies' to permit nearly anything. Barrett continues to parade "Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms” and promise that this isn't a blanket permission slip for lower courts to turn into an interest-balancing approach that never recognizes gun owner interests, and no one with two brain cells to rub together should believe it. The progressives continue to argue in favor of overturning Bruen (and, implicitly, Heller), and beyond that just making that blanket permission no-gunnie-interest interest-balancing test the rule instead.
There's a separate Gorsuch concurrence, but, unsurprisingly, it is not going into the fine details of esoteric interpretations in some way that might help Second Amendment causes, and instead just to announce how much the court is punting.
In theory, the concurrences draw out a large array of other challenges to the same statute that would be more suspect, but we're several years -- and several far more sympathetic cases -- into SCOTUS punting on them, there's no way to bring a challenge without risking your freedom, and no guarantee that you'd not find yourself Abramski'd even if you did. The most optimistic gloss I can read is a bit of text for Range, but Range doesn't even have cert yet, and I would not be surprised to see him GVR'd for another three-year-delay.
Tactically, domestic violence was not the battlefield that gun folks should be contesting.
They were on a good streak since Heller, but this was a bad case and you’re right it made bad law.
The Supreme Court denied cert to multiple cases with more sympathetic defendants in favor of Rahami, whose case was brought by public defenders and not any organized gun rights organization. They chose a bad case because they wanted to have as much an excuse as possible for walking back Heller and Bruin, which the lower courts have rejected.
Is this maybe a good thing? I see no personal challenge to my gun rights living in a red state - I think large Federal gun restrictions died with the % of the electorate who owned a gun increasing during COVID/the summer of Floyd.
If blue states want to pass more restrictive laws: A. That's a plus for federalism, the only way I see to reduce the national partisan temperature B. That provides lots of fun little opportunities for research on differences in shooting and such that a unified national regulatory structure does not.
It's not a plus for Federalism when their rights apply everywhere but yours only apply in your home state.
Their right to abortion now only applies in blue states.
Yes, that's their singular loss.
Laws around soft drugs are another example, even if widely disregarded.
That's federalism but not a case where something credibly* claimed to be a Federal constitutional right was reduced to only holding in some states. If Mississippi didn't have to recognize gay marriage or Florida could ban flag burning, that would be more like it.
* Yes, I realize conservatives don't believe there's credibly a constitutional right to abortion, but I figure having a long-lived Supreme Court precedent holding so is sufficient credibility.
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