It’s been 18 years since the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, and in the nearly two decades since the Court has only taken up six cases directly related to those rights. Five years after Heller, SCOTUS struck down Chicago’s ban on handguns, and in 2016 the justices issued a per curiam opinion that Massachusetts’ justification for banning stun guns did not comport with Heller or McDonald.
It took another six years for the Court to conclude that the right to bear arms was violated by New York’s “may issue” permitting scheme. Two years later, in 2024, the justices informed us that “when an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
That brings us to this year and the Supreme Court’s decisions in Hemani and Wolford, holding that regular marijuana use does not exclude someone from exercising their Second Amendment rights, and that a default ban on concealed carry in all private property open to the public does violate our right to bear arms.
After waiting years between SCOTUS decisions impacting the Second Amendment, the fact that we had two cases decided in one term is a welcome development. It’s also one that longtime 2A litigator Pete Patterson expects to be the norm going forward.
Writing at SCOTUSblog, Patterson says the Second Amendment “is an increasingly active part of the court’s docket.”
Second Amendment cases no longer are epochal, groundbreaking jurisprudential events that come along once a decade (or less). Going forward, we can expect more terms like this one, with the court deciding one or more Second Amendment cases as it continues to define the contours of the right under the Heller-Bruen regime.
I sure hope that Patterson is right, because there are a number of critically important issues for the Court to address.
SCOTUS ruled Hawaii’s “vampire rule” out of order, but in the four years since Bruen the court has yet to discuss the expansive “gun-free zones” established by states like New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of the Bruen decision. It’s also declined to take up the issue of reciprocity, or the ability of Americans to bear arms beyond the border of the state where they live.
The Court did agree to address bans on so-called assault weapons next term, but as of right now they’ve left the question about magazine bans on the table.
Even though there’s a circuit court split on the issue, SCOTUS also declined to take up any of the five cases dealing with restrictions on the Second Amendment rights of adults under the age of 21; an issue that impacts millions of young adults.
Waiting periods, gun-rationing, sky-high fees for carry permits, bans on gun possession by non-violent felons, and laws meant to aid suing the firearms industry into oblivion have all gone unaddressed by the Supreme Court, but many of these issues are currently making their way to the Court’s doorstep.
We know the Supreme Court will address the issue of “assault weapons” bans next term, but will the justices grant cert to additional Second Amendment cases? A cert petition was recently filed in Calce v. City of New York, a challenge to the Big Apple’s ban on stun guns. The state of Maryland is supposed to reply by the end of August to the plaintiffs’ cert petition in Novotny v. Moore, which asks the Court to address Maryland’s “numerous prohibitions on carrying firearms in many places frequented by the general public violate the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.”
There will be plenty of opportunities for the justices to add to their Second Amendment jurisprudence next term. If Patterson is right, then the justices will take advantage of at least some of those opportunities instead of passing them by.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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