Gun Laws In Chaos After Supreme Court's Historical Evidence Demand

The Supreme Court's effort to clarify its expansive reading of the Second Amendment has set off chaos. Last year's decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decreed that gun-control laws of today must have a clear forerunner in weapons regulations around the time of the nation’s infancy, regardless of the public-safety rationale behind them. The result: Hundreds of gun cases have become a free-for-all, with courts conflicted or confounded about where to draw limits on gun rights, reports the Wall Street Journal. “There’s all this picking and choosing of historical evidence. ‘This is too early. This is too late. Too small, too big,’” said Judge Gerard Lynch of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during an argument about a new law in New York that prohibits guns in sensitive places like parks, museums and bars. “The whole thing puzzles me.” In that case, the right of licensed gun owners to carry weapons into bars and theaters could hinge on 19th-century statutes that barred drunks from carrying firearms, and outlawed guns and butcher knives in parties attended by ladies. A case last fall held that the federal ban on guns with obliterated serial numbers was unconstitutional because unmarked guns were legal in the 18th century. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that to pass constitutional muster, gun restrictions within the scope of the Second Amendment must be deeply rooted in historical precedent. Governments must show that their laws are similar, or at least analogous, to firearm regulations widely enforced around the time of Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791. “What I don’t think I’ve ever seen elsewhere is a demand by the court that every single difficult case be resolved by a historical record that contains so little information,” said Nelson Lund, a George Mason University legal scholar. Judges are at odds about how to use centuries-old weapons laws, many obscure, to evaluate modern-day restrictions and firearm offenses. Founding-era weapons laws, a complete list of which is still being assembled by researchers, were concerned with gunpowder storage, preventing accidents and keeping guns away from slaves, Native Americans and British loyalists.