The Supreme Court decided two gun-related cases this term. What firearms are legal and who can have them all expanded in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision two years ago in United States v. Bruen. Bruen strengthened Second Amendment rights in America by calling for a test that analyzes whether there is a “historical tradition” for a particular gun regulation. If not, the Second Amendment barred the law. The Bruen holding launched hundreds of lawsuits challenging gun restrictions nationwide.
In United States v. Rahimi, the Court took the opportunity to decide whether a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order is the type of person who historically could be viewed as someone properly subject to a firearm disability under the rule the Court announced in Bruen. Putting the brakes on application of the historical-tradition framework from the Bruen decision, the Court said that lower courts had “misunderstood” Bruen and suggested they were applying Bruen too broadly. It reiterated that the Bruen holding does not require a historical twin as a precursor, but only a precursor that is relevantly-similar to the regulation at issue. For the Court, those subject to domestic violence restraining orders are people who pose a credible threat to others – the relevantly similar historical analogue here – and are appropriately barred from possessing firearms. The Rahimi holding is likely to slow the tide of challenges to a number of different firearm regulations, including those challenging firearms disabilities for felons and drug users.
Garland v. Cargil was a case about the rule making authority of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The ATF issued a rule following the 2017 deadly 2019 shooting in Las Vegas classifying semiautomatic handguns outfitted with “bump stocks” as machine guns. Bump stocks are a device that helps a semiautomatic weapon fire rapidly as if it were a machine gun. Machine guns are outlawed and so classifying semiautomatic weapons this way outlawed using bump stocks under the rationale that they then became machine guns. The Supreme Court struck down the administrative rule because the bump stock equipped guns did not strictly meet the definition of a machine gun, even though functionally they operated like one. The holding in this case was not about the Second Amendment or glorifying machine guns but it was about the Supreme Court taking a strict textual view of the machine gun definition.
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