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The general rule is that all pro-gun rulings are limited and fleeting and have no practical effect; all anti-gun ones are lasting and build the basis for further restrictions. So there are two immediate possibilities: the ruling will be stayed pending appeal. Or, the government will not appeal it, and, like the earlier post office ruling, it will be limited to only the plaintiffs. The way that would work is SAF and GoA members would be able to sell such weapons to each other and the government would be enjoined from stopping them, but no one else could and further SAF and GoA would no longer have standing in a broader challenge.
Hardly seems true given that the last few years have been constant 2A wins at SCOTUS. For an area of law that basically didn’t exist prior to 2008, it’s going extremely well. Have there been any major SCOTUS 2A losses ever? I guess the about sbs in the 30s? The interstate commerce ones that allow regulating them I suppose, but given that everything is interstate commerce I think that barely counts.
Lots of cases on felons and firearms and sentencing, but few people are really committed to letting felons have guns, and it’s pretty unlikely that it was intended by the founders anyway.
Sure, there are court wins, but has that translated into legal guns are actually getting purchased or CCW permits being issued in DC, Chicago or NYC?
No, but most legal issues where there’s a huge split between states desire to do something and SCOTUS go on for quite some time. If the courts weren’t continuing to take up gun cases I’d be worried, but Roberts is enough of an institutionalist that it seems like he’s going to keep striking down state laws until the line of “this is the absolute constitutional maximum you can regulate firearms” gets found and all the liberal states stick to that line. Going from “no personal right to firearm ownership” to litigating the specific types of weapons that can’t be banned or the circumstances one can be carried on the person is a lot of progress in 18 years frankly.
People point to progressive wins like Roe and Obergefell as these inevitable conservative losses when those issues were fought for way longer than to get to the SCOTUS case. And Roe got overturned after only 50 years, after over 70 years of activists agitating to legalize it!
As an aside, abortion was less of a blatantly progressive win when Roe came around, supported most strongly by Southern Evangelicals along with California and New York. It was primarily a Southern Democrat stance and seen as a liberty issue more than what it is now.
When Roe hit, people in Red states were able to secure abortions. When Obergefell hit, homosexuals in red states were able to get married. We are now many years and many victories past that point on guns, and none of these victories have actually allowed people in Blue states to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, even in many cases the people who specifically won their cases in the Supreme Court. Further, the court has shown a worryingly consistent habit of backing down from or dodging cases addressing the issue, often rejecting cases with much stronger facts in support of the second amendment, in favor of cases with much weaker facts.
I used to believe that the Constitution was whatever five justices said it was. Now it is evident that it is not even that. We have tested the question of whether the Supreme Court can get a decision Blue Tribe doesn't like to stick. It cannot.
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No. These "wins" have been carefully circumscribed to have no effect. You can theoretically get a carry permit in blue states, but they've taken advantage of the hedging and loopholes to make it so even if you do, you'll end up violating one of many of the vast "sensitive areas" which makes you a felon. SCOTUS stuck a footnote in Bruen which allowed the blue states to keep their prior-restraint permitting regimes fully intact, so I still can't buy a gun in New Jersey (or any other state, because the NFA is still intact) nor could I carry if I had one.
I agree that the states are fighting tooth and nail on this one, and progress is slow-going, but it’s slowly moving towards a more favorable legal environment and certainly isn’t moving to a more restrictive one, at least overall nationally. For an issue that isn’t particularly popular and is extremely unpopular among the educated and wealthy, that’s doing pretty good.
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