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SCOTUS picks a couple Gun Cases... kinda
SCOTUS has granted cert on two separate firearms-related cases, Wolford v. Lopez and US v. Hemani, for the upcoming term, and they're a bit night-and-day.
In Wolford, plaintiffs asked to block a law after Hawaii had put an effective ban on carry in almost all of the state. This is the 'Bruen says you can't just declare the entire island a sensitive space, Hawaii asked how about five islands then' case. While a couple goofier parts of the law did receive a temporary injunction, the lower courts notably did not block a requirement that CCW permitees get explicit and specific permission from any private property owner before carrying on their property; even the Second Circuit found this sort of requirement (nicknamed a "vampire rule" by opponents) as so likely unconstitutional as to mandate a temporary restraining order against it. Worse, the 9th Circuit did so under a chain of logic depending on very recent laws and sometimes even private company restrictions to justify Hawaii's rule, with little actual relevant to the rule in question here, while simultaneously promoting the historical analogues to such wide spread of generality as to permit any law. For the "vampire rule" specifically, Hawaii was only able to find two analogues even under that widely expansive standard, one an anti-poaching statute and one a literal post-Civil War racist Black Code, and the 9th Circuit still found it close enough despite the explicit text of Bruen that "[W]e doubt that three colonial regulations could suffice to show a tradition..." This is, yet again, plain defiance of higher court rulings.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird, because it's not really getting into all of that. The only question SCOTUS granted cert on was the "vampire" rule itself; the petitioners also asked about the 9th Circuit's fishing expedition into more recent laws (and non-laws), and SCOTUS punted on that despite a wide and clear circuit split. SCOTUS can and has granted cert for broader questions that petitioners asked, before, and without doing so, this seems near-certain to result in a decision good for one case only; even a Thomas-level dicta won't actually have a holding that applies even to other vampire rules, nevermind other 'declare an island a sensitive place'-style laws.
Hemani is more complicated. A lot of media coverage focuses on a comically bad set of claimed background details -- the US government claims Hemani is not merely a drug user or a jerk but a literal Iran-tied worshipper of terrorism -- and to a large extent, those claimed details overdetermine the near-certain resolution of this case. Like Rahimi, SCOTUS wants the case with the worst possible optics so as to give the thumbs-up to expansive gun control regulations; there's even a lot of tea leaves to suggest that the Biden-era DoJ put some effort into tailoring this case, given that the government conceded the case as covered by a different case they thought wrongly decided. A naive reader might hope that this is going to result in some broader rule that, even if bad for Hemani himself, leaves stricter rules for merely incidental drug-and-gun users, but you'd have to be really naive.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird. The lower courts put a lot of analysis on how poorly the government supported a blanket ban and how expansively they held it to apply to cases far more unreasonable than Hemani's, but ultimately it leaves the prohibited person rule in place so long as the government show the drug user wasn't sober while possessing the gun. Indeed, there were other earlier cases with the same constitutional question, answer, and far more palatable facts: the government just didn't request cert for Connelly; they don't seem to have been important enough for SCOTUS to care. Nor, frankly, does this case even seem to leave things unsolvable even for the constraints of its specific people, since not only does Hemani have a bunch of other things going on worth a lengthy prison sentence, it's not even clear why the government couldn't prove or at least present evidence toward the Connelly intoxicated-while-possessing standard.
There might be some schadenfruede to watch the left side of the bench throw away due process rights in favor of gun control (or, conversely, Thomas and Alito throwing gun rights under the bus because eww pot), but only to the extent anyone has any shame left.
On its own, these would not necessarily been that offensive as selections, but they are on their own. The court's selection of other recent cases has not been quick to grab every marginal or borderline case. There's no small number of other, broader cases going up before the court and only getting the punt. Duncan and Viramontes are both up for cert, now, and in Duncan's case both for final judgement and for all the marbles: failing to grant cert does not merely encourage more broad gun control, but actively will claw back a lot of previously-lawfully-owned property with a happy finger-flip to the Takings Clause, too. There's no law saying the court can only take so many gun cases, but if you had to put a bet about whether the court would pick two or four, the over/under is pretty clear.
Vullo Is Back... kinda
lol jk, there's basically zero chance of a cert grant on these facts
Adamiak had his day in the Fourth Circuit... kinda
Adamiak was accused and found guilty of posessing machine guns. The SAF has more details on both the charges and the convictions, but to be as a tl;dr: they weren't actually machine guns, or even guns. The ATF argued, under the Trump admin, that disabled (sometimes to the point of being cut in half) and inert pieces of a firearm were still machine guns or rocket launchers, because they could be brought to real functionality... by long efforts by skilled experts bringing in sizable parts, in some cases including everything that actually functioned.
Where the court says "thoroughly reviewed", that's got a bit of an asterisk. The Double Jeopardy clause gets a bit more than a page; the other constitutional arguments get...
Yes, that Bianchi. Happy Fuck You Too Day, Justices, this is what your punts have bought; this is the nonconsentual volunteer VanDerStok demanded. And it's going to go nowhere. Malinowski is still dead, his widow's lawsuit is going nowhere, and no one cares that the agents involved gathered more bodycam footage of his widow pissing than they did of the actual raid. Dexter Taylor's still in prison, and in the unlikely situation his case ever gets to a court that actually recognized the Second Amendment as existing in their courtroom, he'll have served a majority of his unjust sentence first.
Reese v. ATF Wins... kinda
Reese is one of many lawsuits challenging the federal prohibition on sales of handguns by FFLs to people between the age of 18 and 20. Most of these have died quick deaths to mootness; prospective plaintiffs can only bring a challenge for three years after the matter becomes ripe on their 18th birthday and before it becomes moot on their 21st, court cases making decisions in that time frame (and not involving illegal immigrants) are rare, and they're rarer still in Second Amendment contexts. Organizational plaintiffs have thus had to prepare a consistent parade of young adults willing to sacrifice a lot of potential negative attention in trade for benefits that likely won't include them, while also ducking other procedural hurdles.
But Reese pulled it off. A complaint filed in November of 2020 eventually made it to a January 2025 appeals court decision which held:
And even more surprisingly the federal government did not appeal to SCOTUS. Perhaps that's downstream of a change in administrations, perhaps it's just caution about setting broad jurisprudence against a law, perhaps it's just about incompetence. But finally, a major change that could drastically impact a lot of people could apply to jurisdictions too wide for legislatures to just file the serial numbers off and try again, even if it's just one circuit.
Why am I only writing about it now? Why hasn't been newsworthy that a whole Circuit has let 18-year-olds buy handguns?
Well, the circuit hadn't; for various procedural reasons the appeals court does not issue mandates, and the trial court was in no hurry. October 7th finally (finally!) had a final judgement issued. And that judgement came with a massive caveat:
That's not even a "if you were a FFL and a member of these orgs before November 2020, you can't be prosecuted under this unconstitutional law". Only where the buyers are under-20 and were members of the groups a half-decade before does the declaration apply. This judgement might not be literally absolutely toothless -- someone might have bought their thirteen-year-old kid a membership in the SAF five years back -- but it's so close that the distinction is meaningless. Forget "old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit", we've got young men making serious sacrifices for shade that covers nobody, ever.
The judgement was revoked for other even dumber reasons -- the judge demanded each org provide a verified membership list within 21 days, which wasn't going to fly at SAF for a variety well-formed objections and the government (claims to) have never asked for or wanted in the first place. So now we're waiting til October 27th to even start planning on how to have a final judgement in a case whose appeal opinion issued on January 30th, and I can accurately joke about how a healthy woman can make a baby faster than Robert R Summerhays, a duly-appointed honorable member of the federal court system, can make a decision protecting the real rights of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. And assuming the judge in question is not excessively overdue, in a month I can even joke about how, no, the courts don't do that for normal people.
(Additional bonus: no attorney's fees for the plaintiffs, so they probably spent between 50k and 150k on a case that means bupkiss. Why? Because fuck you that's why.)
I don't think there's too much to read in between the lines here. I think the question already implies an answer, and will box in the potential arguments that can be put into the case.
I think irregardless of text and tradition, the court already likes "sensitive places" and will probably rule that the sensitive places rule is already precedented by Heller (technically not overturned by Bruen) and also supported by text and tradition. The question would then fall to the determination of what a sensitive place is, and the court would likely also rule that the definition of a sensitive place must change with the times and thus the line itself will not be drawn by text and tradition, simply the concept.
What I expect to come out of Wolford then is some sort of test that would be used to determine if a place is indeed sensitive or not. I'd expect to see the vampire rule slapped down, but gun free school zones and federal facilities to survive. We would then have to hope for the best in a test that is reasonably strict that can slap down a a few other bs rules as well.
Worst case is that scotus simply says that the court should determine sensitivity, then vacates and remands without making a test. Then we'd have to spend another 2 years in 9th circuit hell before it gets sent back to scotus.
On the surface level, there's an immediate problem where this case's question is just astonishingly bad for that purpose. Its holding can only be whether "Hawaii may presumptively prohibit the carry of handguns by licensed concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public unless the property owner affirmatively gives express permission to the handgun carrier?" Anything more specific will be dicta, and the Ninth Circuit will ignore dicta they don't like, and this case only exists because they already ignored SCOTUS saying specifically you can't just declare a whole island a sensitive space.
At the deeper level, there's so much else going on in this case, both in the other question the plaintiffs brought up, and in the other questions relevant in the appeal. If SCOTUS just wanted to a case to nail down a test for sensitive places, it's nonsensical to exclude the Ninth Circuit's bizarre. And the law in question here separately blocked "all parks and beaches, playgrounds and youth centers, bars and restaurants that serve liquor, and places of amusement and libraries", questions squarely presented in the petition. There's so many better and wider questions if they wanted to apply a rule to solve the sensitive places flat.
I'm... a lot more pessimistic on worst-case scenarios. I don't think it's likely that SCOTUS gives a full thumbs-up to the vampire rule, but it's painfully plausible that they'll end up with an explicit test that's either so vague or so broad that any remotely specific ban can pass it, and then punts for eternity as lower courts take that to permit more expansive bans than the 'overturned' one SCOTUS ruled on. Wouldn't be the first time.
That's not true. The court will answer that question as part of the case, but whatever test and reasoning they use to answer that question will be precedent. Whether or not lower courts ignore it is a different story.
Not quite, in the link you provided yourself, the only two questions formally presented in the petition are about the vampire rule and the question about historical analysis.
... not really? In normal courts, that's the rule, but the Ninth Circuit specifically has a unique relationship with stare decisis: simultaneously, even pure dicta from within the court may be binding, but to overrule a past case:
Yes, there's also the problem of lower courts ignoring SCOTUS as a matter of practice, but specifically the Ninth Circuit as a matter of open policy does not merely require the holding be part of the question raised for the case, or even that the holding be essential to the determination in the case, but that its logic be clearly irreconcilable. Otherwise, only an en banc Ninth Circuit court may overrule one of the many copious Ninth Circuit en banc opinions holding the Second Amendment to mean nothing.
Fair. They were not Questions Asked in the sense of showing up in that section of the pdf, just questions brought up with a full exploration of their factual and legal background.
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It seems to me the only reason to take the case in this particular way is to affirm the vampire rule.
I doubt it. If the court wanted to allow the vampire rule to stand, they would either just do nothing or take a case where a lower court overturned the vampire rule.
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