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Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone:
That'd be a great opinion. It's not one.
Only Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch have dissented from the denial of certiorari, which means that there is no Snope case now. This was final judgement (specifically, dismissal of the lawsuit), there are no other appeals, and there is no other chances. Maryland has banned a wide array of very common firearms, with vague definitions, the lower courts have held that these guns aren't even guns nevermind protected by the Second Amendment, and SCOTUS has punted. While Maryland's law here includes a grandfather registration clause, the circuit has already held that such clauses are unnecessary, none of the takings clause people cared, and SCOTUS punted. Binding law in the 4th Circuit holds that a firearm is not an arm.
It's also a case that has been rife with bad behavior from the lower courts; Thomas's dissent emphasizes the logical flaws, but I'll point out that under the name Bianchi this is the case that was held for over a year by a single judge on the appeals court who didn't file a dissent. There will be no percolation; 2A-favorable analysis of these laws will not be allowed to reach SCOTUS, and it will be smothered before en banc whenever possible.
Kavanaugh wrote an interesting ... concurrence? Dissental?
Pile of bullshit? Statement. The record calls it a statement. This is particularly interesting because it only takes four to give certiorari; he literally could not write a dissent.Again, would be a great opinion! It's not one, either. Instead:
Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Roberts and Barrett, as typical for the majority in denials of cert, have no comment.
Kavanaugh gives a list of lower circuit cases that "should assist this Court's decision-making".
To be blunt: this SCOTUS will not be address the AR-15 issue in "the next Term or two". There will be no grand cases from the lower courts with a serious investigation of the Second Amendment ramifications that split the baby some perfect way. There will always be some excuse why a specific case wasn't the ideal vehicle, or why some new one that's just reached oral args is the better vehicle later, or why some specific law wasn't the best demonstration. Optimistically, Kavanaugh got a promise from John "Article III is <Not> Worth A Dollar" Roberts and will find out how much that promise is worth; pessimistically, Kavanaugh's a politician wearing robes and this is what he says to get readers (especially the sort that might make unscheduled visits to his house) to believe what he wants them to believe. Eventually, Thomas and Alito will retire, and either we're going to get much worse judges from a technical side who can actually make a fucking decision that matters when it shocks the conscience of the Amtrak world, even if that means they'll also bark on command when Trump asks, or a Dem president will get those seats, and either way, the conservative legal movement and anything deeper than a pretext of originalism will go the way of the dinosaur.
Meanwhile, the plaintiffs here get nothing. They will be out years of their lives trying to bring this case, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and attorney's costs. They will either have moved from Maryland, or gotten rid of any 'assault weapon' that they once owned, or never been allowed to buy one. A decision in a term or two will not protect Ocean State Tactical, another (pre-final-judgment) case SCOTUS denied cert on today, from being just as completely fucked over. Even should SCOTUS find their balls or be delivered new ones and eventually issue a pro-gun ruling, most circuits have standing orders that only recognize the most complete and on-point decision from SCOTUS as overruling circuit precedent, and the one exception is the 9th Circuit (and with a "when we like it" rule). SCOTUS has happily demonstrated, for the better part of a decade, that they will not smack wrists over that. Anti-gun lower courts will take this as an affirmance in the meantime.
It's not even as though guns are the only matter here: SCOTUS has similarly punted on the question of But It's Mean on Free Speech. Hell, guns aren't even the only thing in the guns cases. The court has similarly punted on the question of whether But It's Guns on Due Process, or But It's Guns on Free Speech [see also], or But It's Guns on Court Settlements, or even But It's Guns on the very caselaw that SCOTUS thought so beyond the pale that they'd managed to scrounge up a 9-0 before.
And, of course, there's the blaring siren in the room. As Thomas points out, SCOTUS has punted on this very specific legal question for over a decade post-Heller, while claiming a right delayed is a right denied. SCOTUS has a case covering the type of gun Heller was trying to bring in Heller I, it's listed for conference for Thursday, it's been over a decade, and they're gonna deny it, 99.9999%. And where I'd once point out that it's been longer since Heller than it was from Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell, and Dick Heller still can't register (lol) the actual gun from his original case, I'm instead going to something a little more specific and recent. SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend. That's what SCOTUS cares about, and for every single court case they punt on in my lifetime -- whether challenges to a law like this, or people sitting in prison like Dexter Taylor -- this the standard they've set, and then forgot as soon as a normal citizen who hasn't beaten their wife got involved. Every single second longer than six hours, for cases that have 'percolated' for years.
Some peoples rights need be resolved right away, and others can wait and wait and wait.
While I do not know the specifics, based on priors I would guess that this involved a suspected gang member being at risk of imminent deportation to some El Salvador mega prison. As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
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I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations. One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it. Or that they meant 'state of the art military firearms, in perpetuity', because surely nobody would beat any tyrant today with flintlock rifles. Or even that they meant weapon systems to wage war in general, from man-portable antitank weapons to stealth bombers and nukes.
Previous case law has extended 2A to cover cartridges, revolvers and semiautomatics, but not automatics or explosive weapons. As far as the original purpose of the second (to enable the population to resist a tyrant like the US did during the revolutionary war) is concerned, it is very much moot. If the tyrant fields a tank, then the Americans owning what is currently legal for them to own, AR15s or no AR15s, will lose very badly in a direct confrontation. To give them the firepower to even have a fighting chance against tanks or airplanes would also give them the power to effortlessly take out school busses or jumbo jets, and this is a trade-off which few people will favor.
It should also be pointed out that the current SCOTUS has been otherwise quite Republican-friendly. They overturned Roe (which to be fair was always a stretch) and they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president. I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
The easy test case here is cannons: they were well-known in the 1780s, they're clearly not useful for personal defense since they're tremendously unwieldy and are only really militarily effective in a standing battle, and they've got the potential for mass casualties loaded with grapeshot or other shrapnel, or property destruction loaded with explosive shells.
So, were cannons privately owned at the time of the Constitution's writing? Did the Founding Fathers take legal steps to ban personal ownership of cannons? Doing some scanning, my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons, I certainly can't find any landmark case saying "well rifles are fine, but cannons are too far". People mention private cannon manufacturers, privateers, and private artillery companies, although I will note that a lot of this seems to come out in response to Biden saying "you couldn't own a cannon during the Revolutionary War" during a speech, so it has become a culture war thing. And the Massachusetts militia gathering cannon at Concord was the kickoff of the Revolutionary War.
Rifled cannons are currently banned, but that seems to be part of the NFA in 1934, well past Founding Father influence, and smoothbore cannons appear to still be legal.
One of the coolest parts in Paine's "Common Sense" was the suggestion that we could get by without a standing navy if only we subsidized merchant ships who use some of their cargo space for cannons, to deter piracy without a dedicated navy but also to make it possible to organize a dedicated navy quickly in the event of war. The question wasn't "should people be allowed to own cannons?", it was "are we getting enough of the positive externalities of people owning cannons?"
There was a wonderful period in between the ancient "Divine Right of Kings" and the modern "Divine Right of Governments" where intellectuals seemed comfortable with the idea that governments are just made of people. Five years ago I'd hoped the left might get back to that point, since "Defund The Police (who can't be trusted) but also Ban Guns (using Police, the only ones who can be trusted with guns)" is just too clearly oxymoronic, but in hindsight my definition of "clearly" may have been overly expansive. English grammar doesn't have the concept of "transitive adverbs", which is a shame since English vocabulary has transitive adverbs.
I was going to make fun of that as spherical-cow thinking by a guy who had never seen naval service, but T-Paine actually had a slightly more complete plan.
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.
Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.
The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.
To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.
Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)
I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.
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