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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14565 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Can you imagine the courts doing "interest balancing" on whether the government can restrict your speech?

Yes: "time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech are exactly this. I don't point this out to disagree with your substantially correct point that the Court is much less deferential to the Second Amendment than to the First, and frankly I don't think they're nearly deferential enough to the First. But they do engage in "interest balancing" on basically all issues. There is a reason Iustitia wields a balance scale.

The courts mostly have been treating gun regulation as an interest in itself -- often a compelling interest which overrides the First Amendment, as with the Defense Distributed case and various other 3D printing cases. They'd never do anything like that for the First.

That is fair, "time, place, manner" is more interest balancing that I wasn't thinking about - but the scales are much more defined on the first than the second.

You've got three levels with the first amendment: strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis. The problem was a lot of courts were treating the 2A with "rational basis" level analysis far too often when they should be treating most with strict scrutiny most commonly which is what I think SCOTUS is slowly building towards if they keep taking on a couple 2A cases per session.

While I expected them to uphold the vampire rule, and am thus surprised, the court is a long way from anything like strict scrutiny, given that in Bruen's footnote 9 they basically give the blue states carte blanche to impose prior restraint on gun rights, as NJ has.

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