Why Gun Reform Is Being Strangled By The Courts

Oregon voters handed gun reformers a major victory when they backed a ballot measure creating one of the country’s most stringent systems for buying and selling firearms in 2022. When District Judge Roger Benitez overturned California’s 34-year-old assault weapons ban two years ago, he pointed to Heller, saying that under the decision, “it is obvious that the California assault weapon ban is unconstitutional.” Because the Heller ruling applied to guns in common use, the sheer volume of semi-automatic rifles in America protects them under the Second Amendment, according to Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Federation. But in the Western District of New York, another judge hearing a similar case said the four state laws and two territorial laws the state government offered as historical analogues were “outliers” that didn’t “show endurance over time.” In any case, the Western District judge wrote, these laws were enacted in the late 19th century, well after the adoption of the Second Amendment in 1791. Wison called restricting gun ownership for people subject to domestic violence orders an “outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.” Domestic violence was not considered a crime in any U.S. state until 1871 – after the time period that laws must now originate from to be considered a part of the country’s historical tradition, according to the Supreme Court. “Poll after poll shows support for reasonable restrictions.” The sweeping opinion that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas authored in Bruen v. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association has transformed American gun regulation.